Case File 245 · Investigation Psychology

Why Do People Justify Their Actions Instead of Denying Them?

By Murder Book Editorial TeamPublished by Gungrounds, the studio making Murder BookPublished 3 October 2026Updated 3 October 2026

When people are challenged, they often justify what they did, arguing it was reasonable or understandable, rather than flatly denying it. They do this for well-studied psychological and social reasons, not because justifying is a tell for guilt. Admitting an act while defending it reduces the discomfort of feeling one has done wrong, it fits the ordinary social habit of offering an "account" when behaviour is questioned, and it lets a person protect their self-image as a decent person. Sociologists and psychologists have mapped these moves for decades. The key point for any investigation is that a justification is a claim about meaning and motive, not evidence of a crime, and it is certainly not proof that the person is lying.

Key takeaways

A justification accepts that an act happened but argues it was acceptable; a denial disputes that it happened at all.
Justifying reduces cognitive dissonance, the discomfort of holding "I did this" and "I am a good person" at once.
Sociologists describe justifications and excuses as normal "accounts" people give when behaviour is questioned.
Justifying is common among both the innocent and the guilty, so it is not a reliable sign of either.
A justification is about motive and meaning; what actually happened still has to be established by evidence.

What is the difference between justifying and denying?

The distinction is old and precise. In their 1968 paper "Accounts," sociologists Marvin Scott and Stanford Lyman separated two ways people respond when their conduct is called into question. An excuse admits the act was wrong but denies full responsibility ("I couldn't help it"). A justification accepts responsibility for the act but denies that it was wrong ("yes, I did it, and it was the right thing to do"). A flat denial does something different again: it disputes that the act happened at all.

So when someone reaches for a justification, they are usually conceding the basic fact and contesting its meaning. That is a narrower move than a denial, and it tells you where the disagreement really lies: not over what happened, but over how it should be judged. Distinguishing this from outright evasion matters, which is why deflection is treated as its own topic.

Why do people justify instead of simply denying?

Several strands of research point to the same underlying pressure.

Reducing dissonance. Most people hold a self-image as reasonable and moral. When they do something that clashes with that image, the mismatch is uncomfortable, and one of the easiest ways to resolve it is to decide the act was justified after all. Justifying is less a strategy aimed at an interviewer than a way of staying at peace with oneself.

Giving a socially acceptable account. Scott and Lyman argued that excuses and justifications are "socially approved vocabularies" that repair the gap between what someone did and what others expected. Offering an account is simply what people are taught to do when challenged; silence or a bare denial can feel more socially costly than an explanation.

Neutralising guilt in advance. In their 1957 account of "techniques of neutralisation," criminologists Gresham Sykes and David Matza described how people hold on to a law-abiding self-image while breaking rules, using moves such as denying that anyone was really harmed, or appealing to a higher loyalty. These are justifications that blunt guilt rather than deny the deed.

Disengaging moral self-sanctions. Albert Bandura's work on moral disengagement, set out in a 1999 review, describes how people reframe harmful conduct as serving a worthy purpose, or recast it as justified by circumstances, so that it no longer triggers self-condemnation. Justification is one of the central mechanisms he identified.

Across all four, justifying is a normal human response to being accused, found far beyond any criminal setting. People justify a missed deadline, a sharp word, a broken promise. The behaviour is about managing guilt and reputation, not a hidden switch that flips only when someone is guilty.

It is worth noticing how ordinary the pattern is. Ask almost anyone why they were short with a colleague, and the answer is rarely a bare "I was wrong"; it is "I was under pressure, and they had pushed me all week." That is a justification, offered by someone who has committed no crime and is not lying. The same machinery runs in an interview room. Expecting a suspect to respond to an accusation with a flat admission or a flat denial, and treating a justification as suspicious because it is neither, misreads how people normally talk about their own conduct.

Does justifying mean the person is guilty or lying?

No. This is the mistake the behaviour invites and the one to resist. Because both innocent and guilty people justify their actions, and because a justification often concedes a fact that is not even in dispute, the move carries little diagnostic weight about deception. The wider deception literature reinforces the caution: behavioural cues to lying are weak, and people detect lies at only about 54% accuracy, so treating any single conversational pattern as a tell is unreliable. There is no single reliable sign of deception.

There is a subtler trap, too. A compelling justification can be entirely true. Someone may justify an act precisely because, in context, it was defensible, and a rehearsed-sounding story can still be true. The content of a justification, how plausible and well supported it is, matters far more than the fact that a justification was offered at all.

What should an investigator do with a justification?

Separate the admission from the argument. A justification usually contains a concession, "I was there," "I took it," "I said that," and that concession can be checked against the evidence. The surrounding argument about why it was acceptable is a claim about motive and intent, which is a different question from what happened.

Note exactly what has been conceded, and corroborate it independently.
Treat the justification as a hypothesis about motive, then test it rather than accept or dismiss it.
Avoid reading the mere act of justifying as an admission of guilt; it is not, and treating it that way risks tunnel vision.
Remember that refusing to justify, or staying silent, is equally uninformative, as whether silence signals guilt explains.

How does this play out in Murder Book?

Murder Book: The Art of Interrogation is an upcoming narrative interrogation game from Gungrounds, an independent studio in Zagreb, Croatia, inspired by real police footage and psychological interviews. Because each case turns on reading unreliable stories and weighing contradictions, the difference between a suspect who denies an act and one who admits it but defends it is exactly the kind of distinction the game asks players to notice.

Development screenshots show an evidence board that links statements together, for example a claim like "I NEVER met her!" set against other parts of an account. The research here is a reminder that when a character shifts from denial to justification, that shift is a lead to follow, not a verdict: it tells you where to point the evidence, not who is guilty. Cases are designed for focused 5–10-minute sessions, so the work is judgement and comparison rather than wearing anyone down.

Murder Book is in development for PC (Steam) and mobile, with release currently planned for the end of Q2 2027.