That doesn’t excuse their behavior, but does help to explain it. And can help you understand how to deal with a difficult situation.

Full Article Here: http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/10-018.pdf

There has been a plethora of research in the motivated reasoning literature showing that people can rationalize anything to fit an opinion or judgment (i.e. how preferences affect how we evaluate information, or how Fox News sees Steve Brown’s celebrity status as good, but Obama’s celebrity status as bad -the Daily Show does a great job of pointing this out on both sides of the political spectrum).
But for people like Gehris who “professed to have racked up 54 decorations, when really he just had one” that might take more than just rationalization, it might require self-serving memory alteration, or a “Motivated False Memory.”

Some Types of Motivated Memory

-Behavior Frequency- When people are told tooth brushing is a good thing they remember having brushed their teeth more often. A similar finding was found when people were told behaving in an extraverted or an introverted manner was a good thing.

-Imagination – When we imagined events that did not happen but we wanted those events to have happened, we express more confidence that they did happen.

-Forgetting Word Pairs – When people are motivated to forget word pairs they saw, their hippocampus, the memory part of the brain, partially shuts down.

-Visual Motivated False Memories – At the SPSP conference in Las Vegas this week, my fellow UC Irvine students and I from the Peter Ditto (motivated reasoning) & Elizabeth Loftus (false memories) Labs are presenting a new finding. In our study participants remembered physically interacting with a different person than they actually did when it supported their self serving motivations. This study suggests self-serving motivations are sufficient to create a visual false memory of a real life detail.