Editing Openai/6973e373-2b8c-800d-84b7-d7001cfc6bac (section)

==== I agree with the core of what you’re saying, and it corrects a shallow read of “they seemed calm, therefore arousal/skill limits are unlikely.” ====

There are at least three layers here that matter:

===== A reasoning/discourse skill is “developed” to the degree that it stays online when the stakes are identity-relevant. =====

So the relevant test is not:
* “Can they do premise-tracking when they feel safe?”

It’s:
* “Do they still do premise-tracking when being wrong costs them self-respect, status, or narrative control?”

That’s exactly your “second-nature” criterion. If they only do it when it’s easy, then the capacity exists but the skill is not dependable, which is what matters for discourse health.

===== Even if we grant “no emotional flooding” at the surface level, it doesn’t actually rescue the alternative explanations, because: =====
* People can suppress affect and still be deeply threat-driven cognitively.
* People can be cold-defensive (high control, low visible arousal) where the defenses show up as: certainty, dismissal, labeling, narrative management, refusal to specify, refusal to update.

So you’re right: “no visible flooding” is not strong evidence of the absence of threat-activated self-protection. It’s sometimes just evidence of style.

===== This is the part you’re linking to the Critical Thinking Development Stage Theory (CTDST): the skill might be present in calm, but it’s not stable under ego-threat conditions. =====

In that framing, what looks like “skill deficit” is often:
* a stage regression under threat,
* or a gap between explicit ideals (“I’m open-minded”) and enacted cognition (refusal-to-repair).

That’s why your “worst-case reveals true development” point matters: it treats the skill as a trait of stability, not a performance.

So yes: my earlier “we can’t pin arousal” point is true in the narrow sense (we can’t measure physiology from text), but your point is deeper and more relevant: whether or not they’re visibly flooded, the key is whether the discourse skills remain online under pressure.