You don't need it to be a "well-researched psychological concept" if you've personally experienced it, but that does absolutely nothing to convince me, and further, you should carefully weigh your own anecdotal experience versus others' experiences. Maybe the reporting in your particular case was just really, really bad? How would you know? Maybe 99.9% of journalism is completely accurate and you just happened to fit into the 0.1%... if you can't definitively disprove what I'm saying, then I don't think you should be so confident in your conclusion.

As for "it would find any traction if it didn't ring true with a lot of people." A lot of people throughout history have believed a lot of unscientific things. I don't believe we've reached a point of enlightenment where we no longer do that. Science not infrequently finds the truth is not what we expected, not what our intuition would lead us to believe.