Why do people make decisions that make themselves hypocrites?

[jrlolli592]

For example
First: (let us assume that motorcycles are safer than horses(yes I know this can be debated))

Parent: Hates motorcycles, thinks they are very dangerous and you essentially will die
Parent also has a spouse that rode motorcycles and got very injured/stopped riding and now at the age of 47 has started again(they are still married)

Parent lets child1 start taking horseback riding lessons and go horseback riding with no research as to how safe it may be.

Child2 wants to ride a motorcycle but parent won't let child2
(child2 has been inquiring about a motorcycle for longer than child1 has even thought of going horseback riding)

Child2 presents hard evidence as to why horseback riding is close to 20 times more dangerous than riding a motorcycle

"Horse riding carries a high participant morbidity and mortality. Whereas a motor-cyclist can expect a serious incident at the rate of 1 per 7000 h, the horse-rider can expect a serious accident once in every 350 h, ie 20 times as dangerous as motor cycling." (i would post the link but i'm not allowed) you can find this info by just googling

Along with various other sites that support this information with some saying the difference in accident rate is even greater.

Parent does not seem receptive to information and declines approval of motorcycle to Child2
Child2 inquires about Parent re-considering their decision to allow Child1 to ride a horse since it is proven to be more dangerous than a motorcycle
Parent does not want to re-consider decision to allow child1 to ride horses
Child2 asks parent if they could take horseback riding lessons with child1
Parent says Yes.
Child2 protests that this would make Parent a Hypocrite and that they are only letting child1 to continue to ride horses because they are not capable of accepting the fact that they made a poor decision and did not research horseback riding safety.
Parent is very safety conscious, to the point where parent won't partake in any activity where they may get hurt i.e. skiing or snowboarding

So. the question
why does parent1 make the decision to allow child1 to continue to ride a horse and child2 to not ride a motorcycle
is it because of an authority issue?
maybe the inability to admit to making a poor decision?
shame that they did not take the time to assess the risk of horseback riding and by not allowing child1 to continue this would incriminate them of doing just that?
why is it that society may believe horseback riding is less dangerous? could it be the negative stigma attached to motorcycles? maybe the fact that horseback riding is less prominent in everyday life?
why would a parent so safety conscious overlook the risks?

question was intended to get people thinking or get a debate going on answers lol
I just found this to be very interesting that a person would purposely make a decision that would make them a hypocrite.
but it also seems that the factors that go into why they still let child1 to ride a horse outweigh the fear of becoming a hypocrite
you may also consider how this situation may be different depending on gender, parent is female but would gender make a difference assuming personality traits stay the same? I guess society would then play more of a role so gender may not be as important as the influence of society on that gender
it's interesting how family dynamics, gender, personality, dominance, society norms, and the need to conform to those norms, etc play a part in situations such as this one

[voodoo scientist]

Is this a general question using this as an example, or is the question specifically designed to resolve this scenario? I hope it's the former, because the latter is boring.

Humans are problem solvers, or computers in the sense that we compute solutions based on the information available. Part of computing solutions is defining the boundaries of the problem, and this is where one will find the origin of  this "hypocrisy" - the parents, in this scenario, have defined the risk value of horse riding per hour to be outside the bounds of the problem of motorcycle riding safety. If I were to hazard a (largely meaningless) guess, I would say that they simply don't consider horses to be comparable to motorcycles.

If humans didn't do this, it would be virtually impossible to assess risk for anything at all! Imagine if, before one had to make any risk decision, one would have to compute an optimal (rather than a satisficing) solution in the way you are looking for the parents here to: it would be virtually impossible due to combinatorial explosion. The only viable computational strategy at that point would be to avoid all perceived risk above X (fairly low) threshold, which would probably mean any behavior beyond bare necessity for survival would have to be avoided - not to actually prevent risk, but to prevent having to compute the risk.

In sociological terms, hypocrisy is "bad" because it makes it computationally harder for other actors to correctly predict the intent and future behavior of hypocritical actors, which requires more information to be processed. However, this is a great trade-off for the individual brain, because the extra information processing needed to compute solutions to these irregularities of other actors is much smaller than computing optimal solutions for every little risk problem, partly because employing limited boundaries (even though they may lead to hypocrisy) affords the human brain the capability to easily compute the risk that this will happen, which would be impossible or unfeasible without such a capability.

The motorcycle child MC is also "hypocritical" (remembering that hypocrisy is really just an observer effect) in the same way as the parents here. MC has defined the safety problem in terms of crashes per hours used. However, it's entirely possible that the average risk is actually higher for motorcycles, such as if motorcycles are used for more hours/day on average than horses, which is quite likely. On the other hand, MC might well be a motorcycle riding genius that, if allowed to ride, would never crash due to extremely well developed balance.

At what point can one objectively stop and say "this is the boundary of the problem"? It can't be done. Combinatorial explosion would leave MC calculating the problem until MC's death, and then MC can't ride a motorcycle anyway. This is why in persuasion, it's impossible to get a person to concede hypocrisy without first changing his problem boundaries, at which point conceding hypocrisy becomes moot to the persuader (since the target's problem definition is the problem).

Interesting question.

[HexHammer]

Because of the dualism in man, because we can discriminate, we can love 1 person and hate the other, we can go to war and make terrible attrosseties, yet return home and function as perfectly normal people.

We can preach with our logic and reason, yet our compulsions will overwrite this knowledge and make us do things against better knowledge.