FWIW, I get a feeling you are getting the basics of psychology reasoning basically backwards. Indeed, I think trying to make locally valid arguments from the basis of assumptions of rationality has a much better track record than macro-scale behavior arguments that rely on empirical data collection.
Overall, I think if you are trying to understand how you and other people think, arguments of the type “here is a very common observation, or straightforward hypothetical, let’s use common sense to figure out what people will do in this situation” perform much better than “here is a counterintuitive result which I have backed up with a bunch of experiments”.
FWIW, I get a feeling you are getting the basics of psychology reasoning basically backwards. Indeed, I think trying to make locally valid arguments from the basis of assumptions of rationality has a much better track record than macro-scale behavior arguments that rely on empirical data collection.
Overall, I think if you are trying to understand how you and other people think, arguments of the type “here is a very common observation, or straightforward hypothetical, let’s use common sense to figure out what people will do in this situation” perform much better than “here is a counterintuitive result which I have backed up with a bunch of experiments”.