When asked why you did something, have you ever given a carefully thought out answer only to be told, “That’s just an excuse!” It’s a subject which comes up fairly often in the therapy room.
A while back, I remember reading some online forums for autistic people discussing the difference between a reason and an excuse, and people seeming to struggle with defining it.
Now, if you ask me why I did something, and I don’t think about why you are asking, then my understanding of what you are asking goes something like this,
“I assume you are asking me to detail the causal chain which led me to performing the action you asked me about.”
People however aren’t generally asking for a reason, even though they say they are, rather what they are looking for is for me to justify why I did what I did, which isn’t quite the same thing as wanting to know my reasons.
I had been sat on the above thought, like forever, when I was surfing social media for my sins, and I came across this little snippet of a conversation which fairly neatly illustrates this issue. The male partner is complaining that his female partner doesn’t know the difference between a reason and an excuse,
If I try to explain why someone did something she assumes that I’m making an excuse for them.
Her: “Janet was so mean to me! She was just looking at me weird all day.”
Me: “She could just be dealing with something honey, she’s normally your friend.”
Her: “Why are you never on my side?!”
Me: “I’m not on her side, I’m just explaining why she might be weird today, if she’s normally not weird “
Her: “You’re just making excuses for her!”
[edited for spelling and punctuation]
I have no reason to assume the participants are either neurodivergent or neurotypical, but what I like about this snippet is that there is so much to analyse in such a short and seemingly innocuous conversation, with much of it relevant to the difference between a reason and an excuse.
But first a minor detour...
In their book “The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding,” Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber start with a mystery. If our evolutionary superiority was supposedly reliant on our big brain’s ability to reason, then why were humans so bad at logic?
And we are surprisingly bad at classical logic...
The theory they came up with, is that our ability to reason evolved in response to the pressure of maintaining harmonious relationships in complex social groups - it is in fact our ability to co-operate which has been key to our success as a species.
Mercier and Sperber deduced that in order to maintain social relationships, your brain does not need to be that good at logic, but it does need to understand what makes a good social reason.
A good social reason does not need to be true, or even the ‘real’ reason why you did something, but it does need to be one which is readily accepted by others.
This social justification system, helps us to regulate social behaviour, protect social norms, aid in decision making, interrogate another’s motives, make predictions about behaviour, and last but not least, be used as a means of persuasion.
It just so happens that this system can also do a fairly decent, if somewhat flawed job at thinking logically. The reason why our thinking experiences so many fallacies and biases is because it never evolved to be logical, it evolved to be good at maintaining social relationships.
Back to our arguing couple…
When people ask you for a reason for something, such as when someone asks, “Why did you do that?” they are in fact asking you to justify your action(s). Usually they are asking because you have broken some social norm, and so are asking you to justify your decision, e.g. “Is there some reason you parked in the CEO’s space today?”
It is the variation in the application of social rules which is creating the split in the conversation above. For the female partner, engaging in social situations may contain rule sets like, ‘people should make an effort to be nice’, ‘people shouldn’t take out their bad day on others’, and ‘people should put on a good show when in public’.
Therapists might call these internalised social rules, introjects, but they are more commonly referred to as social norms. Behaving outside these social norms, especially in public settings, is only socially acceptable if the person is perceived to have ‘a good enough reason’,
Her partner’s explanation that, “[Janet] was just dealing with something,” butts up against her own internalised social norms. And here is the thing: the female partner might in fact agree that this was the reason Janet was behaving weirdly, but she would disagree that it was sufficient reason, hence her retort, “you’re just making excuses for her!”
So just to be confusing, reasons and excuses are both reasons, but the key difference between them is whether they impart sufficient justification, thus…
An excuse is a reason which is deemed to give insufficient justification for a course of action.
For the female partner, ‘dealing with something’ is insufficient justification for ‘being mean’, hence, “that’s not a reason, that’s an excuse!”
There is however a lot more going on here than just a disagreement about whether something is a reason or an excuse. The female partner is wanting her partner to to recognise her feeling of hurt at being ignored by a close friend, but his response is to offer a reason which acts as a dismissal, hence her angry response.
The partner meanwhile, is seemingly reliant on a different set of social norms, which prioritise minimising conflict by making allowances for bad behaviour from friends. For him his social justification is a valid reason. His desire to minimise conflict though, is not necessarily a good strategy, and can lead to issues such as internalised anger and poor boundary setting.
And just to complicate things further, I wondered whether the female partner was ‘projecting’, which is a therapy term meaning to see something in others which exists in yourself. Is there in fact a Janet somewhere out there complaining to her partner that her friend was offish and rude to her all day...
After that mini-diversion, back to the point..
The fact that the two participants can not agree on whether ‘dealing with something’ is a reason or an excuse, indicates that there is no objective standpoint from where this could be determined.
The reality is that this is an issue of perception; whether something is an excuse or not depends on who and in what context your social justification is being received. This means that in one setting the exact same justification will be called a reason, while in another it can be called an excuse.
Navigating the maze
For many neurodivergent people this can be complicated territory to navigate, with lots of seemingly arbitrary rules.
It can be especially difficult if you are trying to explain why you need something a particular way, only to be confronted with, “But that’s just an excuse!”
This kind of statement can also carry a sense of disbelief. If something is seen as an excuse, you can end up in a frustrating conversation, where the question is repeated, as the person searches for your real reason. What the person is typically looking for is a socially normative response.
If you do give the socially normative response - I might do this to shortcut conversations - then you can end up in the bizarre situation where your response is accepted as a valid reason, when in fact you have given them a fake reason…
…also often called an excuse!
Problems can also happen if you ask someone why they did something, and then get caught off guard by the hostile response. Because why questions are typically only used when enquiring if a person has sufficient justification for an action or decision, they are almost invariably read that way, even when the enquiry is genuine. Why questions are typically considered challenging or judgemental.
One of the interesting insights into Mercier and Sperber’s idea, is that when human reasoning is used for social justification, people do not need to know what their actual reason was, they only need to be able to construct a socially acceptable reason, and for it to believed. One of the features of this is that the person themselves also believes their own reason.
If you are an observer of people, as many neurodivergent people are, you will notice these inconsistencies; people will often say one thing and do another, while being seemingly unaware that there is any contradiction. When you ask them why, their reason will then not fit with their observed behaviour.
This effect turns up in experiments such as the bystander effect, where a person’s stated reason for helping or not helping does not fit with the experimental conditions. So no it’s not you imagining it, it is an observable effect.
Usually information gained from direct observation, particularly if there are multiple repeats, is often significantly more predictive of how someone will behave, than how they say they will behave in a given situation.
For me personally what I like about this kind of analysis is how it allows opportunities for pattern matching, and then being able to relate that to theory, and then use that to make predictions. I also like how much of what I have explored is also consistent with ideas such as bottom-up and top-down processing. I find it satisfying when seemingly different ideas mesh together.
I spend a lot of time thinking about things like this... perhaps too much time…