How far the temperature climbs after you pull something off the heat depends on three things you already decided while it cooked: how thick the piece is, how hot the oven or pan ran, and what its surface does the instant it hits open air. A steak seared hard and a roast pulled from a slow oven can finish at the exact same internal temperature and still carry over by wildly different amounts, because the size of the rise has almost nothing to do with the number on the thermometer. It's about how much superheated meat is sitting just under the surface, waiting to move.
Why a thicker cut stores a deeper reservoir of heat
The center of a piece of meat only ever learns what the surface already knows, and it learns it one thin layer at a time, by conduction. That travel is slow, and it gets disproportionately slower the farther heat has to go. A cut twice as thick doesn't just have twice as much meat sitting under its crust — it holds a deeper, hotter reservoir of it, roughly four times as much stored heat, because conduction crawls inward at a fixed rate no matter how far the trip is. That's why a chicken breast carries over by a degree or two and a whole prime rib can keep climbing for ten minutes after it leaves the oven. The breast never built much of a reservoir in the first place.
Why a hot, fast roast carries over more than a slow one
Two roasts can hit the exact same internal temperature and still be carrying two completely different amounts of stored heat, because the oven's temperature decides how steep the gradient was when you pulled it. Roast something hard and fast and the exterior races well past your target long before the center catches up, so by the time the center is done, the outer inch or two is sitting far hotter than it. That steep drop-off keeps conducting inward hard after the meat is out of the oven. Roast the same cut low and slow, and the whole piece has hours to inch toward the oven's own temperature together — center and surface end up closer to each other, so there's less of a gradient left to collapse once you pull it.
Why the surface cooling off doesn't cancel out the center heating up
The moment meat leaves the oven, two things start happening at once and they aren't opposites. The surface starts losing heat outward to the room — faster on a wire rack in open air, slower under foil or in a warm spot, hardly at all in an ice bath. At the same time, the hot layer just beneath that surface keeps conducting its heat inward, because it's still hotter than the center, and it doesn't know or care that the outside is cooling off. The meat as a whole is losing heat the entire time. The center still rises anyway, because it's drawing from a reservoir that hasn't caught up with the room yet. An ice bath overwhelms that — it pulls heat out of the surface faster than the interior can ever push it deeper — but short of that kind of shock, the center keeps climbing on its own schedule.