Comment by jerf

"If the person's different activities _actually_ resulted in a significant difference of time the car has been sitting, it's likely the owner themselves would be able to easily deduce what could really be the issue."

Oh, I wouldn't even remotely bet on that. Even in my professional sphere of programming I've been caught by what I call "cognitively available" theories of what the problem is that turn out to be entirely wrong in the end, because the real problem is something I wasn't even remotely considering before hand, and possibly even would have dismissed if it had crossed my mind.

If you don't even know what "vapor lock" is, and I assure you this will describe the majority of car owners, why would you think "time in store" is the difference?

What is cognitively available to this person is that they buy different sorts of ice cream and that causes the problem. It puts the spotlight of cognition on that factor to the exclusion of other things. Even the engineer trying to solve the problem was probably slowed in his investigation by such an appealingly available issue being proposed first; again, I've certainly experienced this in my own professional sphere where someone proposes some explanation that ultimately turned out to be completely spurious, and it takes actual effort to get both myself and my team off of that line of thought.