Member-only story
How Unconscious Pressures Influence Your Decisions
Here’s a 20-second video. Watch the video before reading on, since reading on might ruin the video for you!
The trick in the video may or may not have worked for you (it worked for me the first time I ever watched it!). If it did work, I can think of at least two theories to explain why. The first is that there’s no real trick at all, but because thousands of people watch the video, many will randomly think “three of diamonds” and then spread the word about how amazing the “trick” is. Meanwhile, everyone else simply forgets about it because it was a boring video that didn’t work. But the second more interesting theory is related to priming.
In the video, the magician is priming your mind with visual concepts. He’s making diamond shapes with his hands and drawing the number three in the air in the corners of an imaginary card. All of these primes are designed to force the mental image — and therefore the mental choice — of the three of diamonds in a viewer’s mind.
