10 • WINNING BODY LANGUAGE
as they inhale the cigarette smoke containing nicotine and additives, these complex organic chemicals enter the bloodstream and most often produce a physical experience of pleasure for them, both in the body and in the mind—quite the contrary of feeling sick and in pain, they experience a pleasurable stimulation. The intellectual understanding of pain of death from smoking is dissonant with the feelings of pleasure experienced during the act of smoking. The tension produced by these contradictory ideas and experiences causes the smoker to find ways of rationalizing the conflict between the intellectual concept of pain and the physical experience of pleasure: smokers conclude things like “everyone dies in the end” or “smoking keeps me from gaining weight, which is also unhealthy” or “I’ll just have one last one and then I’ll give it up!” in order for the physical experience to rationally take precedence. Because a physical experience is often stronger than an intellectual one for the human brain, dissonance becomes a threat to our self-concept (the knowledge we possess regarding ourselves, which creates our own, most stable idea of exactly who we are), and so the intellectual facts are rationalized into an alignment with the physical experience; the smoker has faith that he is not dying from smoking right now.
Illogic Can Be Rationalized Excuses are always easier than behavioral change. Everybody from the bottom floor of an organization to the very top is prone to rationalizing conflicts in an effort to align what she is hearing with the perceived fact, truth, and reality of what she may see communicated. All of us are constantly rearranging, reinterpreting, or simply creating things that have been said in order to fit them into the world that we see in front of us.