Influencing choices with conversational primes: How a magic trick unconsciously influences card choices

Significance This paper shows that naturally embedding primes within a person’s speech and gestures effectively influences people’s decision making. Likewise, our results dovetail findings from choice blindness literature, illustrating that people often do not know the real reason for their choice. Magicians’ forcing techniques may provide a powerful and reliable way of studying these mental processes, and our paper illustrates how this can be...