Also the purpose is basically "if we pretend it can't happen it's less likely to happen." But surely this is the motivation behind most flinching examples.
I disagree. The unusual nature of banking and finance is explicitly recognized and dealt with: you can't throw a rock in the fractional-reserve banking literature without hitting someone talking about self-fulfilling prophecies and the usefulness of central banks having printing presses enabling them to make credible commitments and so on and so forth. This is not the case in most fields and so definitely not the motivation behind most flinching examples.
(eg. Stalin ignoring Hitler's build-up is not an example of optimism being a self-fulfilling prophecy but possibly entirely the opposite, a self-defeating prophecy - the lack of Soviet reaction encouraging the German plans.)
The sentence you quote and the sentence after "I disagree" support rather than contradict each other. (Not after the edit.)
Stalin could have felt that planning for a Nazi attack (which included talking about it because of the possibility of Nazi spies) would increase the odds of a Nazi attack.
Plus, I've read that Stalin had received lots of reports of invasions that proved to be false when the Nazi's didn't invade when the reports claimed they would and Stalin did have good reason to think that the U.K. was trying to plant false evidence of a Naz...
I'm looking for historical examples of "flinching away," so I can illustrate the concept to others and talk about motivated cognition and leaving a line of retreat and so on.
The ideal example would be one of motivated skepticism with grave consequences. Like, a military commander who shied away from believing certain reports because they implied something huge and scary was about to happen, and then the huge and scary thing happened and caused great damage. Something like that.
What examples can you think of?