There's a lot of junk behavioral science out there, but things like "people often go with a default or recommended option so they can move on with their day" seem so obvious to me that I become suspicious of this debunking for debunking too much.
That's just refusing to be convinced by evidence, though. It's good to have hunches, but it's good to let them go after you've done the experiments. Come up with a new hunch and a new experiment that shows why the expected effects weren't seen, and you're right back in there.
"Refusing to be convinced by evidence" is a simplistic false dichotomy. The evidence is interesting but I have several reasons not to immediately take it as definitive.
Are you really certain that a big debunking in PNAS, surfing a wave of other celebrated debunkings, should be taken as definitive, when a good deal of the research being debunked was published to similar fanfare in PNAS back when a different kind of research was fashionable?
I take neither the original research nor the debunking as particularly credible. Without technical expertise, I'm left to educated guess. It's just my guess.
The idea that we should always be convinced by evidence regardless of context is a vast overgeneralization, impossible ("the evidence" overall rarely points only one way, even if the latest chunk of new evidence does), and in contradiction with Bayesian epistemology.
My problem isn't that I think people should be credulous of everything, it's that I don't think "it's just obvious" is a proper counter to experiments that show nothing. If the effect is so obvious, it should be obvious how to design an experiment that would show it.
I don't even know what you're defending here other than believing your first impulse above any subsequent evidence. Nobody is preventing anyone from proving an effect, in fact they poured money into the attempt.
