It’s amazing how unaware we are of the things that influence us, and why. Everyone tends to believe that they’re swayed only by rational persuasion, and appeals to emotion fall on deaf ears. Even when someone has clearly been won over by such tactics, they’ll rationalize that they simply made the correct intellectual choice and it just happened to coincide with the emotional appeal.
What’s very funny to me is those same “rational” people ignore all the evidence that they’re being swayed emotionally. You can’t convince them with a rational argument!
Look, our brains are weird, and I get that it’s uncomfortable to know all the ways they aren’t entirely under our control. But those ways are real even if we ignore them, so it’s better to understand them! At least then you can be predictably irrational, instead of just subject to the whims of a universe you don’t fully grasp.
The Opportunity Machine 