"I'm not wrong, I'm just not explaining it well"

This one is subtle, because it arrives dressed as humility. You're conceding something, which is that your explanation isn't landing. What you're not conceding is the line. If only you could put it better, they'd see it. So you try again, and again, and each version is a little further from anything you believe.

Kunda, reviewing the research on motivated reasoning in 1990, put her finger on how this works. People can reach the conclusion they want to reach, she wrote, but only if they can build what looks like a reasonable justification for it. The wanting doesn't produce the belief directly. It produces a search for reasons, and the search stops when it finds enough to make the belief look respectable. Notice what that means for the third version of your explanation. It isn't a better account of something true. It's a more strenuous search for a justification, and the strain is the sign.

There's a test for this, and it comes from a different line of research. Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil showed in 2002 that people believe they understand how things work, zips and flush toilets and helicopters, in far more detail than they actually do, an illusion they called the illusion of explanatory depth. It collapsed the moment people were asked to write out, step by step, how the thing worked. Philip Fernbach and colleagues did the same in 2013 with political positions. Asking people to explain in detail how a policy would actually work made them less confident in it and their views more moderate. Asking them to list reasons for their view did nothing. Reasons are cheap. Mechanism is where you find out what you know.

So here's the test. When you catch yourself thinking you're just not explaining it well, stop explaining it to them and explain it to yourself, silently, step by step. Not the reasons the second exit is quicker. The actual route, the roadworks, the minutes. If the explanation holds up, you've got a better version to offer, and you should offer it. If it falls apart in your head somewhere around the roadworks, that was the turn, and it happened before you started the third version.