This is hidden brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
In the hit tv show Breaking Bad, high school chemistry teacher Walter White learns he is dying from cancer.
To make money for his cancer treatments for his family, he uses his chemistry expertise to start manufacturing crystal meth.
When his wife Skylar, finds out he's been selling drugs, she is appalled.
In an effort to win her back, Walter asks her to see things from his point of view.
I've done a terrible thing, but I did it for a good reason.
I did it for us.
Walter thinks of himself as a good person, a good husband, a good father.
He believes that the money he gets from manufacturing drugs will keep a roof over his family's heads once he dies.
But as Walter gets sucked into the underworld of crime and illicit drugs, he starts to commit acts of violence in order to keep the money coming.
The deeper he goes, the more rationalizations he invents.
Breaking Bad won a raft of awards season after season.
I personally think of it as the greatest tv show ever made.
What makes this story so powerful is that even though the plot is improbable, it has the ring of psychological truth.
All of us tell ourselves stories about why we do the things we do.
We explain away our flaws and failures, and we come up with plausible explanations for our actions.
Today on the show, the first episode of a two part series, into the human capacity for self justification.
It's also the story of a researcher who has studied the phenomenon for nearly three quarters of a century.
He has explored the psychology of rationalization and the many ways it ends up being used for evil, but also the curious ways it can be used for good.