

We Change Our Minds Less Often Than We Think - jey
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/10/we-change-our-m.html

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whacked_new
Interestingly in today's SD,
[http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071004134103.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071004134103.htm)

Getting participants to think about shopping influenced their travel plans.

There is a phase in the "thinking process" that can be swayed without any
conscious perception of such a process (priming, for the most obvious
example). Of course, by the time an impulse reaches higher-level processing,
it seems reasonable that the subconscious has already fixated on what it
needed to fixate on. In a priming experiment, one would "decide" to choose one
picture over another; even with any observed hesitation, the results are
predictable. It doesn't imply that a "mind changing" process ever occured
though, because the result was deliberately and externally suggested without
the participant knowing at all. When the colleagues were asked to assign
probabilities, this is already very late into conscious processing.

So the keyword here is "think." Whether that is attributable to high-level
reasoning or some limbic impulse changes a lot; consequently I find this post
so much less informative.

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brlewis
More concrete evidence of the importance of first impressions.

