Examining Motive and Self-Deception

How well do we really understand our own behaviour?

I’ve been thinking a lot about motive recently, largely because of writing the latest instalment of the Owain Morgan novel.

Owain is interested in human conduct. When somebody commits an act of violence, betrays another person or does something apparently out of character, he wants to know why.

But increasingly, as I write him, I’ve realised there’s another question.

Do we always know why we do things ourselves?

Ask somebody why they did something and usually they’ll give you an answer remarkably quickly.

Perhaps that should make us a little suspicious.

Imagine somebody cuts across you on the road. You sound the horn, shout something unrepeatable and spend the next five minutes furious about what an idiot they are.

Why did you get angry?

Because he cut me up.

Perfectly reasonable. And perfectly true. But is it the whole reason?

Perhaps you were already late. Perhaps you’d had an argument before leaving home. Something at work might be worrying you. Or perhaps you were simply tired and irritable.

On another morning exactly the same incident might have produced little more than a muttered complaint.

The other driver hasn’t changed. Something in you has.

I find that interesting because most of us carry around a reasonably comfortable idea of who we are. I think I’m a reasonable person. You probably do too.

Then occasionally we do something that doesn’t quite fit. We lose our temper. Say something unnecessarily cruel. Avoid somebody we should probably help. Keep quiet when we know we ought to say something. And then comes the explanation.

I was tired.

He provoked me.

There was nothing I could do.

It wasn’t my responsibility.

All perfectly plausible and some may even be true. But again: is that the whole reason?

That’s where self-deception becomes more interesting to me than simply lying. A liar knows, at least somewhere inside, that he (or she, perish the thought!) isn’t telling the truth. With self-deception we may actually believe our own explanation.

We’re not necessarily trying to fool anybody. Except perhaps ourselves.

This becomes rather more important when the behaviour matters.

Why did somebody lie? Why did they betray a friend? Why did anger become violence? Why did an insult they would have ignored yesterday become intolerable today?

The act itself might take seconds.

What interests Owain — and increasingly interests me — is what happened before it.

That idea lies at the heart of Fault Lines, the novel I’m writing now. The conditions for a geological fracture can exist long before the fracture becomes visible. Pressure accumulates quietly.

But people aren’t rocks, but I like the metaphor.

Perhaps some of our behaviour is rather like that. We notice the moment something breaks and assume that moment explains everything.

Owain would want to know about the pressure that came before.

I’m not suggesting that every explanation we give ourselves is false. Sometimes we know perfectly well why we did something. Sometimes the bloke really did cut us up and we were understandably annoyed.

But perhaps our first explanation isn’t always the complete one.

The longer I spend with Owain, the less convinced I become that human behaviour has neat and tidy explanations. And perhaps the person we find easiest to convince about our motives is ourselves.

So the next time somebody asks why you did something and the answer comes immediately to mind, there might be one more question worth asking.

Is that really the whole reason?

The Bottom Line

We’re very good at explaining our own behaviour. We may not always be quite so good at understanding it.