We Change Our Minds Less Often Than We Think

Interestingly in today's SD, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071004134103.ht...

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.

More concrete evidence of the importance of first impressions.