Yes, this, totally. Back in my network administrator days, I joked about how often people would call me for help, and as soon as I arrived at their workstation and asked them to show me the problem, they couldn't make it fail anymore. I would say "it's my magical presence that fixed it" or some equally inane thing, but I understood that in repeating the steps for an observer they were forced to slow down and think about what they were doing, even if they couldn't consciously identify what they did differently.
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