A couple of days ago, our cat, Precious Mae, bit me. I had been sitting on the bed, putting on my socks, and she bit me. Well, actually, I had just finished putting on my socks and was reaching for my watch when she bit me. Both Michele and I agreed that it was my fault. Let me explain.

Precious Mae loves smelling and – for lack of a better word – cuddling shoes. Michele has a tendency to leave her shoes scattered around the house wherever she happened to take them off. Precious Mae can be walking through a room on her way somewhere else, see the shoes, and go over to spend fifteen minutes smelling and cuddling them.

In this case, Precious Mae was on the bed, cuddling my watch -which I’ve probably worn for at least 300 days during the last year, giving the leather band a smell, I guess, that entices Precious Mae even if I can’t smell it – when I reached for the watch. She instantly bit me, striking like a mongoose. I was shocked. My first reaction was that it was my fault and I said something like, “Oh, I shouldn’t have done that.”. For some reason. the ridiculousness of the whole thing, besides making me laugh, somehow reminded me of people making excuses for their Jaguar breaking down.

Today, Jags are pretty reliable – nowhere near as reliable as a Japanese car or Korean car, but slightly better than a BMW, about the same as a Mercedes – but that wasn’t always the case. They were often very fast and usually gorgeous, but, up to about ten, fifteen years ago, they were notoriously unreliable. Because of their reputation, Jags didn’t ever sell very well which gave them an aura of exclusivity and that, along with the promise of speed and their good looks, meant that there were always some people willing to overlook the reliability problem. I have known three of them – a 4.2 liter E-Type, an XJ12 sedan with a magnificent 5.2 liter V-12, and a 3.8 liter IX Saloon – and all of them were astoundingly unreliable. The buyers were from different eras of my life and didn’t know each other but had one thing in common, when something broke, which almost always happened, they had a sort of excuses that basically amounted to, “It’s my fault, I shouldn’t have driven it”. People willing to defend their cars – or cats, or dogs – at the expense of themselves, I find very appealing, in a quirky sort of way (being one of them, I guess, so, duh).

But I’ve always wondered why. And why do I defend Precious Mae in the same way? I’ve come around to the opinion that it is just good ol’ cognitive dissonance reduction.

Psychologists, like doctors, like to use very precise words, and the longer each word the better because it makes it more precise. As an aside, enginers are the same and Formula One is all about engineering, so, tires don’t wear (out), tires degrade and the distance left before they have to be changed is judged by the rate of degradation. But Formula One is run by racers so everybody just calls it deg as in “I’ve got a lot of deg on the right rear.” End aside. I’m not sure that there is an equivalent for cognitive dissonance reduction so I’ll use the full term.

The theory behind cognitive dissonance reduction is that we can’t hold two opposing beliefs in our mind at the same so we change something to make the opposing beliefs line up. Sometimes, we change the facts or the weight of one of the facts, an unfortunately typical and especially debilitating example is, My spouse is s great human being who has had a hard life but he beats me…so I must be wrong. it must be my fault. One of my favorites is I love watching the animals in our backyard, each one is an individual, living a life, wanting to prosper, wanting to live, but animals are so delicious…it is Ok to eat pasture-raised animals because they have had a good life (except for that one very bad last day).

It is shocking how powerful – powerful mostly because it is not conscience – cognitive dissonance reduction is. We think we are so logical but most of the time we are operating on deeply buried beliefs that we’ve changed the real world to match.