ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Influencing choices with conversational primes: How a magic trick unconsciously influences card choices.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- How does explicit reliability guide choices? Effect of trustworthiness on choice and metacognition.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Article
- Visual Cognition and the Science of Magic.Vision (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- What the Neuroscience and Psychology of Magic Reveal about Misinformation.Publications (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Who's fooling whom in the science of magic?Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
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2 authors.
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Abstract
Past research demonstrates that unconscious primes can affect people's decisions. However, these free choice priming paradigms present participants with very few alternatives. Magicians' forcing techniques provide a powerful tool to investigate how natural implicit primes can unconsciously influence decisions with multiple alternatives. We used video and live performances of the mental priming force. This technique uses subtle nonverbal and verbal conversational primes to influence spectators to choose the three of diamonds. Our results show that a large number of participants chose the target card while reporting feeling free and in control of their choice. Even when they were influenced by the primes, participants typically failed to give the reason for their choice. These results show that naturally embedding primes within a person's speech and gestures effectively influenced people's decision making. This raises the possibility that this form of mind control could be used to effectively manipulate other mental processes.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.