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@useless
I don't think anyone is concerned about your personal intuition, behaviour or subjective psychological benefits.
The problem, and the reason these discussions drag on forever, is that this sort of personal intuition doesn't extend to cover the sort of numbers involved in policy-making. An almost undetectably small effect in some fraction of cyclists on some fraction of rides can still have a significant outcome over millions of journeys.
The insistence on making policy decisions (or recommendations, or whatever) based on evidence doesn't disparage the use of anecdotal beliefs and rules of thumb in individual decisions; nobody does in-depth analysis of all their daily activities. It just acknowledges that these intuitions don't scale accurately to large numbers, and don't form a suitable framework for discussing policies affecting large numbers.