Don't you have exercises designed to catch people rationalizing? If not, you ought to, if yes, did you catch them rationalizing?

Getting people to rationalize during a session is actually quite a challenge. What we have are exercises meant to illustrate situations that people might find themselves in where rationalization is likely. And after a dozen or so examples, this particular subgroup - about 25% of our tested population so far! - just flat-out does not relate to any of the examples.

However, one of them seemed to get "caught" by one example after a friend of theirs explicitly pointed out the analogy to their life. We haven't yet followed up on that case to explore more solidly whether it's really denial or if it was actually our misunderstanding and this person really doesn't rationalize.