How can I make better decisions?

Answer: First, learn about your mind’s default settings and how you need to do some serious re-writing of the code!

Watch this eye-opening and disturbing video. Yale Professor, John Bargh, the leader  in priming research today, shows us we’re not the rational, aware decision-makers we like to think we are. Instead, we’re more like automatons a lot of the time, unconsciously responding to subtle cues in our environment in really dumb ways! After watching this video, you’ll never trust yourself to make a fully sane, rational decision again!

Unconscious behavioral guidance systems – John Bargh

(To skip the intro, watch from 2 minutes in. The video starts off a bit heavy-going and technical, but then quickly becomes rivetting. )

John Bargh provides links to all his recent key scientific papers. His 2008 paper, Free will is un-natural, is a must read. Print it off and take your time to absorb the message.

What can we do about this highly impressionable,unconscious side of ourselves?

Read this article: Changing your brain’s factory settings. The author, Eric Haseltine, suggests we need to become aware of our unconscious default brain settings and to consciously and effortfully over-write these default settings with something better!

It’s hard work being  rational!

Videos showing the amazing power of priming

1. Five-minute excerpt from the BBC Horizons documentary “How to make better decisions”. (Watch from 2 minutes in)

The opening few sentences:

“In 1996 Professor John Bargh shocked and outraged his fellow psychologists by publishing studies that controversially showed that our decisions can be subliminally manipulated. . .

“I’ve ceased being surprised at the results of these studies only because of all the long experience that those things  keep working.” (John Bargh)

The subliminal effect that has rattled so many cages is called priming.

2. Priming, Money and their Effect On Us (6-minute video)

3. Unconscious behavioral guidance systems

In this Aug 2011 video, priming discoverer, Professor John Bargh, sums up several decades of priming research. The video goes for one hour and 20 minutes and can get a bit “academic”, but it’s truly amazing stuff, right down to explaining why we might want to take a long, hot shower when we’re feeling lonely and unloved and why drinking coffee is such a rapport-building thing to do.