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I am also certain that is the thought process, I just don't see how you can actually convince yourself of that. That's why I used the people jokingly giving alibis as a counterpoint. That seems like the same thought process, but processed by a sane mind.
The default for a lot of people is very much anti-Litany of Tarski, and closer to all the corollaries of "faith can move mountains" (an actual idiom, reflecting a paradigm reinforced in all sorts of ways in our dominant culture: cf. also "don't jinx it" contra speculating about bad possibilities). Really believing a thing can make it true, and if the thing being true leads to good outcomes, then isn't it your moral duty to believe it?
It doesn't help that in a lot of contexts where the Random Civilian's beliefs are polled at all, a dynamic holds that with some squinting really looks a lot like faith-based miracles: the sick individual is healed by placebo, and the Ghost of Kyiv style stories translate into a general atmosphere of "Ukraine can do it" that percolates through social media back to the frontlines and results in Ukrainian soldiers being more willing to sacrifice themselves and believing that their fellow soldiers and adjacent units are likely to do likewise and hence actual Ukrainian battlefield success.
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Look into Jonathan Haidt's "the elephant and the rider" model. Most people don't operate in a hyper-rational fashion, motivated reasoning is the norm.
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