there totally seem to be people who don't ever notice it in themselves
Count me in that group ("hardly ever", maybe).
I'm pretty sure that I do rationalize, but I can't recall any explicit occasions of catching myself in the act.
I'm pretty sure that I have abandoned beliefs in the past that I clung to for longer than I should have, but it's hard for me to come up with an example right now.
Perhaps we differ in the explicitness of the meta-cognition we engage in. When confronted with incontrovertible evidence of my errors, I tend to facepalm, think something like "stupid me", update and move on. I don't generally attempt to classify the mistake into a particular fallacy.
Can you share some of the examples you've been using to illustrate rationalization? I'll tell you if I get the same "can't relate to this", or if I can relate but failed to label the equivalent examples in my own past as rationalizations.
Another example, from The Righteous Mind:
...On February 3, 2007, shortly before lunch, I discovered that I was a chronic liar. I was at home, writing a review article on moral psychology, when my wife, Jayne, walked by my desk. In passing, she asked me not to leave dirty dishes on the counter where she prepared our baby’s food. Her request was polite but its tone added a postscript: “As I have asked you a hundred times before.”
My mouth started moving before hers had stopped. Words came out. Those words linked themselves up to say something about the baby ha
Anna Salamon and I are confused. Both of us notice ourselves rationalizing on pretty much a daily basis and have to apply techniques like the Litany of Tarski pretty regularly. But in several of our test sessions for teaching rationality, a handful of people report never rationalizing and seem to have little clue what Tarski is for. They don't relate to any examples we give, whether fictitious or actual personal examples from our lives. Some of these people show signs of being rather high-level rationalists overall, although some don't.