Not to exclude the X factor, but presentation matters. I think vomiting exceptions, stack traces, or error codes in text makes people not care. Not just a layman, but an expert, too.
It reminds me of my cousin, who is a ranger in a national park, when she says something like: "Oh, the deer have been here!" whilst pointing to a patch of ground which looks totally indistinguishable from all the other patches of ground which presumably do not show traces of deer.
Your brain gets trained to see subtle changes only after several exposures to meaning. Joel Spolsky had a similar scenario where the bread making machines looked clean to a trained eye, but not to an untrained one.