I’m talking about hypotheticals. Unless you drill the limitations of a situation into people’s noggins over years of experience, they seem incapable of accepting the hypothetical and must also blurt out “well no I wouldn’t do either!” as if they’d made some great breakthrough against the original idea.

It’s probably more accurate and general to say people tend towards the box of their lived experiences. Make the box bigger and they will be stuck deep inside it, but make it smaller and they will keep pushing out. But in my experience the box is usually smaller larger than bigger.