Psychology Today44%
When Criticism Turns Into Justification 66%
By Matt Grawitch Ph.D.88%
7/20/2026, 3:08:05 PM
Keywords: Criticism, Justification, Schadenfreude, Deserve, Hypocrisy, Values, Accountability, Fairness
BS Summary: This article contains 25 faulty reasoning types, including Hasty Generalization, Confirmation Bias, and Post Hoc (False Cause), with False Dilemma as the most egregious example at 12.2% saturation with 126 hits. Analysis detected 1,104 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,029 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 60.8% and a BS Rank of 66% (6,544 of 19,134 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 65.80% of the article peer group.
It doesn’t always stop at criticism.
Someone says something online—offensive, careless, sometimes just poorly worded—and the response escalates quickly.
At first, it looks like what you’d expect: disagreement, pushback, maybe some ridicule.
But in some cases, it becomes quite extreme.
People start trying to figure out who the person is.
Where they work.
How to contact them.
Personal details get surfaced and shared.
What began as criticism starts to look more like targeting.
And when it crosses that line, the reaction often isn’t *This went too far.
* It’s something closer to: *Well… they kind of had it coming.
*
That shift is easy to miss, but it matters because once that reaction takes hold, people aren’t really asking whether the response itself is acceptable.
They’re asking whether the target deserves it.
And those are completely different issues.
When “Is This OK?”
Becomes “Do They Deserve It?”
At some level, most people recognize that posting someone’s personal information, contacting their employer, or coordinating harassment crosses a line.
Those actions don’t suddenly become justifiable or ethical just because the person on the receiving end said something offensive.
But they aren’t always viewed through the same lens.
Instead, how those actions are viewed starts to hinge on the target.
If the person is seen as deserving—because of what they said, what they represent, or what people assume about them—then the response starts to feel more defensible.
Not necessarily good, but acceptable.
Maybe even justified.
That pattern shows up in more systematic ways as well.
In a series of studies conducted by Giovanno et al. (2026), participants were presented with scenarios involving organizations that held some form of authority.
In some cases, those organizations were described as corrupt; in others, they weren’t.
The researchers were interested in whether people would view illegal attacks against those organizations as legitimate.
What they found was fairly consistent.
When participants were given information suggesting the organization was corrupt, they reported more *schadenfreude*—some degree of satisfaction at the idea of harm coming to that organization—and were more likely to judge illegal attacks against it as legitimate.
But the relationship wasn’t direct or automatic.
The effect of perceived corruption operated in part through participants’ emotional response.
In other words, it wasn’t just that people thought the organization was bad—it was that the organization’s misfortune started to feel warranted, which made the attacks themselves easier to justify.
None of that is especially surprising on its own.
Feeling some degree of satisfaction when something bad happens to a disliked target doesn’t automatically flip a moral switch.
But it does seem to change what starts to feel defensible.
The key is that the target has to be disliked to begin with.
Without that, the emotional response doesn’t really get off the ground.
But once it’s there, it does something subtle.
It makes the misfortune feel earned.
And once that happens, the evaluation of the response starts to change.
The question shifts.
Instead of asking, “Is this kind of response acceptable?”
people start asking something closer to, “Given who this is and what they did, isn’t this at least understandable?”
That’s a much easier question to answer in the affirmative.
From there, reasoning tends to follow.
People can point to fairness, accountability, consequences—whatever helps make the reaction feel coherent.
The justification doesn’t have to be especially strong.
It just has to be *good enough* to support the conclusion that already feels right.
This Isn’t Just About Extreme Cases
The results of the study don’t just relate to extreme cases like doxxing.
The same basic pattern shows up in more ordinary situations.
Someone you don’t like gets publicly criticized.
A colleague you’ve had issues with gets called out in a meeting.
A public figure you disagree with says something clumsy and ends up facing consequences that seem out of proportion to what they actually did.
The scale is different, but the underlying process isn’t.
The reaction often depends less on the nature of what happened and more on who it happened to.
And that’s where things start to get a tiny bit messy.
Because once the target determines the judgment, consistency becomes hard to maintain.
The same action can be condemned in one case and defended in another.
But it’s not because the action itself changed; it’s because the person on the receiving end did.
Why It Feels Consistent—Even When It Isn’t
From the outside, that reaction looks like hypocrisy.
But from the inside, it rarely feels that way.1
Different targets activate different values.
What feels like fairness in one case can feel like overreach in another.
What seems excessive when directed at someone you agree with can feel appropriate when directed at someone you don’t.
The reasoning that follows tends to stay aligned with whichever values are most active in that moment.
That’s part of why pointing out inconsistency usually doesn’t do much.
If the judgment already feels principled, being told it’s contradictory doesn’t really move the needle.
It just feels like the other person isn’t seeing the situation the right way.
It also helps explain why more evidence doesn’t necessarily resolve these disagreements.
Evidence doesn’t determine which values are in play.
It gets interpreted through them.
Two people can look at the same situation and come away with very different conclusions about what was justified—because they’re evaluating it against different standards that aren’t consistently applied.
Part of what makes this difficult to catch is that it doesn’t feel like a compromise in the moment.
It feels like making a reasonable distinction.
*Of course*, this case is different.
*Of course*, this person is different.
*Of course*, the response makes sense here.
But that’s exactly how the shift happens.
The move from criticism to justification doesn’t usually involve a clear decision point.
It happens gradually, as the focus moves away from the action and toward the target.
Once the target is seen as deserving, the rest tends to follow.
Which means the real issue isn’t just whether people are willing to justify harmful or even illegal behavior.
It’s how often that justification is already in motion before the reasoning even begins—simply because they feel the target deserves it.
Analysis
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