[jjoonathan]

The stickler: attention bias.

The more time you spend thinking about a possible negative outcome, the more likely your intuition will believe that negative outcome to be. This affects everybody, even people who ought to know better, like scientists. It's a shockingly strong effect, too.

If you don't couch your logical discourse inside a procedure that translates its outcome directly into action (like an approval process), attention bias is almost guaranteed to override the outcome, no matter how good your reasoning. Since better reasoning takes more time, this leads to the unfortunate circumstance where better, deeper arguments are less likely to be effective that shorter, weaker arguments.