I think you are citing the exception(s) to the rule. Most GMs are stronger than IMs imo. I don't think it's psychological. I have played players (GM and otherwise, including other untitled players like myself) that I know are so much better than me because they win and I can't even comprehend how they arrived at making the moves that they did.
As an aside, this is kind of an issue I have with chess analysis. A computer can 'verify' that a certain move is good or bad. That's fair enough. But in the past I have seen players (of lower skill level to me) discuss analysis in for example, a battle between two bigname players.
I have sometimes wondered if these discussions are truly honest because I have seen moves made by top players that I don't even understand how they arrived at the process of deciding that was the correct move vs others. Excluding GMs, a human simply cannot prune the game tree at depth like a computer can. So discussing a few tiny branches of the game tree like one is correct and the others aren't just seems really silly for the rest of us.
As an aside, this is kind of an issue I have with chess analysis. A computer can 'verify' that a certain move is good or bad. That's fair enough. But in the past I have seen players (of lower skill level to me) discuss analysis in for example, a battle between two bigname players.
I have sometimes wondered if these discussions are truly honest because I have seen moves made by top players that I don't even understand how they arrived at the process of deciding that was the correct move vs others. Excluding GMs, a human simply cannot prune the game tree at depth like a computer can. So discussing a few tiny branches of the game tree like one is correct and the others aren't just seems really silly for the rest of us.