Grice and Goffman on irrationality

Speranza

"He who passes [for a normal] finds unanticipated needs to discolose discrediting information about himself, as when a wife of a mental patient tries to collect her husband's unemployment insurance."

(Goffman, p. 83).

"He also suffers from "in-deeper-ism," that is, pressure to elaborate a lie further and further to prevent a given disclosure. In regard to concealing mental hospital commitment of spouse, see Yarrow, Clausen and Robbins, op. cit., p. 42.