Bad faith (Sartre)
Lying to yourself about your freedom: treating yourself as a thing with a fixed nature ('that's just who I am') or as wholly determined by circumstance ('I had no choice') to escape the anxiety of being responsible for what you do. Sartre's examples are the waiter who plays at being a waiter and the woman who lets her hand be held while pretending not to notice.
What drives it
Responsibility without excuse is hard to bear; bad faith hands the decision to a role, a nature or a situation. It also runs the other way: claiming pure freedom while ignoring real facts about yourself.
How it shows
Work
'I had no choice: the board, the market, policy.' 'That's just how I am, I'm direct.' 'It's above my pay grade.' The executive who fires people 'reluctantly', as if the decision were made somewhere else. Total identification with the role: 'As CFO, I can't care about that.' Hiding behind process.
Relationships
'I can't help it, I'm the jealous type.' 'That's how I was raised.' 'You made me angry.' Staying in a dead marriage 'for the kids' without ever examining it. The affair that 'just happened'.
Self
The passive voice, and 'can't' where 'won't' is true. Sartre's check: say 'I am choosing this' about the thing you say you have no choice in, and notice the discomfort.
What tells it apart
Rationalisation: Rationalisation gives good reasons for a choice; bad faith denies a choice was made. Listen for 'I did it because...' versus 'I had to'.
Locus of control: External locus of control is a consistent belief that outcomes depend on luck or others; bad faith is selective, claiming agency for successes and none for what the person would rather not own.
Learned helplessness: Learned helplessness is a real loss of expectation that action works, and the person goes passive across the board; bad faith keeps acting and simply disowns the action.
A test
Ask 'what would have happened if you had done the other thing?'; if there is an answer with a real cost they preferred not to pay, it was a choice, and 'I had no choice' was bad faith.
Questions to carry
- If the other thing had been done, what would have happened, and what cost was being avoided?
- Where do I say ‘that’s just who I am’ or ‘I had no choice’, and what choice is hiding there?
How strong the research is
clinical. A philosophical concept taken into existential psychotherapy (Irvin Yalom, 1980) rather than a measured construct; neighbouring research on external locus of control and self-serving excuses is well supported.
Where it comes from
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1943
Sources
- Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (1943)