Many people are like this, especially in business. Given a problem, and our own personal biases and experience, we will always tend to favor a certain answer. Then what would normally happen is that we force fit the scenario to make our preferred answer the right one.
Did the folks at BP experience this, during that fateful project?
Not sure how many ideas have been killed because of this thinking.
Take a look at the alt tag of that image:
Handy exam trick: when you know the answer but not the correct derivation, derive blindly forward from the givens and backward from the answer, and join the chains once the equations start looking similar. Sometimes the graders don't notice the seam
Thanks XKCD!
