 Discussions of adaptive preference formation are often found in the literature—both feminist and nonfeminist—on rational choice theory (Elster 1983; Superson 2005; Cudd 2006). According to Jon Elster’s classic description of adaptive preference formation, a fox, after finding that he can no longer reach some grapes, decides that he does not want the grapes after all. The fox adapts his preferences to what he perceives to be the options available to him. In order to distinguish adaptive preference formation from preference change due to learning and other processes, Elster proposes that the former is an unconscious process in which an agent turns away from a preference to avoid unpleasant cognitive dissonance that is associated with holding on to it. According to Elster, this is a “blind psychic process operating ‘behind the back’ of the person” (Elster 1983, 16; see also Colburn 2011). Others characterize adaptive preferences as those the agent finds herself with after “life-long habituation” (Nussbaum 2001, 80; Sen 1995; see also Khader 2009, 2011). For example, Martha Nussbaum describes the case of poor working women in India who, though subjected to physical abuse by their husbands, choose to remain in the marriage. Some women, like Vasanti, think that the abuse “was painful and bad, but, still, a part of women’s lot in life, just something women have to put up with as part of being a woman dependent on men, and entailed by having left her own family to move into a husband’s home” (Nussbaum 2001, 68–9).