It absolutely does. Both of what I listed are real world examples. I was the pepper junky until I got into my 20s and discovered salsa and Chinese and Indian. I like my food hot. Unless I know it’s a spicy dish I’m going to hit most things with pepper, because if it ain’t listed as spicy it’s not spicy enough for me. And if it turns out it was spicy and I added pepper anyway, fine by me, now it’s more spicy.
And my grandmother had the muscle memory thing. Every time she sat down to eat, 2 shakes of salt, 2 shakes of pepper. It was just part of eating for her. After having some she might go for more salt or pepper, but that routine could not be broken.
Edison was absolutely making an assumption. He assumed they assumed while not recognizing that everybody is different and the same action could be done for many many reasons.
First off, seasoning a bowl of soup that a potential employer is serving you without having any idea what is in it as far as seasoning is the very type of thing he was looking for as someone not suited to be a researcher of the unknown, calling it muscle memory just makes it sound more stupid and unthinking.
As far as liking seasoning, what does that have to do with an unknown bowl of soup? You don’t know how spicy it is, or if it is too spicy already, or how much additional spice it might need.
Edison was weeding out people who bull through with habit and assumptions rather than examination, all he was looking for was for you to taste first to see what the situation of the soup was.
What makes you think he wasn’t serving an already overly seasoned soup just to reinforce the reject’s mistake in presuming things?