Or when people are carrying out post-hypnotic suggestions. They will come up with plausible reasons for their behaviour if asked. Scott McCloud talks about th

Or when people are carrying out post-hypnotic suggestions. They will come up with plausible reasons for their behaviour if asked. Scott McCloud talks about this in "Understanding Comics" as well, where he calls it "closure": the human mind hallucinates information to make the inputs it receives coherent. The neat thing IMO is that it will do this with "internal" inputs as well.