All Motivated Reasoning and Self-Justification

Motivated reasoning is a mental process through which individuals access, construct, and evaluate their beliefs in response to new information or experiences where their biases cause them to arrive at desired conclusions.

Wishful thinking is the formation of beliefs based on what might be pleasing to imagine, rather than on evidence, rationality, or reality.

Self-propaganda is the way in which people convince themselves of something regardless of the evidence against it.

Choice-supportive bias or post-purchase rationalization is the tendency to retroactively ascribe positive attributes to an option one has selected and/or to demote the forgone options.

Moral disengagement is a term from developmental psychology, educational psychology and social psychology for the process of convincing the self that ethical standards do not apply to oneself in a particular context.

In social psychology, a motivated tactician is someone who shifts between quick-and-dirty cognitively economical tactics and more thoughtful, thorough strategies when processing information, depending on the type and degree of motivation. Such behavior is a type of motivated reasoning.