If a car is trying to yield to me, and I want to force it to go first, I turn my back so that the driver can see that I’m not watching their gestures. If that’s not enough I will start to walk the other way, as though I’ve changed my mind / was never actually planning to cross.
I’ll generally do this if the car has the right-of-way (and is yielding wrongly), or if the car is creating a hazard or problem for other drivers by waiting for me (e.g. sticking out from a driveway into the road), or if I can’t tell whether the space beyond the yielding car is safe (e.g. multiple lanes), or if I just for any reason would feel safer not waking in front of the car.
I will also generally cross behind a stopped car, rather than in front of it, at stop signs / rights-on-red / parking lot exits / any time the car is probably paying attention to other cars, rather than to me.
One possible factor I don’t see mentioned so far: A structural bias for action over inaction. If the current design happened to be perfect, the chance of making it worse soon would be nearly 100%, because they will inevitably change something.
This is complementary to “mean reversion” as an explanation—that explains why changes make things worse, whereas bias-towards-action explains why they can’t resist making changes despite this. This may be due to the drive for promotions and good performance reviews; it’s hard to reward employees correctly for their actions, but it’s damn near impossible to reward them correctly for inaction. To explain why Google keeps launching products and then abandoning them, many cynical Internet commentators point to the need for employees to launch things to get promoted. Other people dispute this, but frankly it matches my impressions from when I worked there 15 years ago. It seems to me that the cycle of pointless and damaging redesigns has the same driving force.