Although not emboldened, this sentence in the abstract best explained the jam tasting problem: "Proactively used reasoning also favors decisions that are easy t

Although not emboldened, this sentence in the abstract best explained the jam tasting problem: "Proactively used reasoning also favors decisions that are easy to justify but not necessarily better." That is, the students focused on the quantity of reasons, not necessarily the most important reasons. It reminds me of the Bayesian stuff I've been reading about on lesswrong.com. And in that way, it best describes 'rationalisation': an overemphasis of less important aspects of a problem domain, often because of bias or because of difficulty in discovering the more important aspects, as in the jam example.