You Can't Influence Me!

Research in the field of social cognition suggests that priming may considerably influence our behaviour. Primes may influence our mood and behaviour without us being aware of them. Bargh et al. (1996) asked participants to arrange lists of words to form meaningful sentences. In the experimental group, each word list contained a word related to the concept of old age: wrinkled, ancient... Participants were

surreptitiously timed as they left the laboratory after completing the task.

Those in the experimental group, who had been exposed to the elderly primes, left the laboratory more slowly than those in the control group, who were not exposed to the primes. Bargh et al. argued that the primes activated a stereotype of old age and participants behaved in accordance with that stereotype even though they had not noticed the primes. 

Neumann and Strack (2000) showed that people' mood can be affected by the mood of others around them, even when they are unaware of their mood change or its cause. When participants listened to text read in a sad voice, they were more likely to rate their own mood as sad but were unaware that their mood had changed as a result of listening to the sad voice.

Liberman (2000) argues that implicit cognitive processes, such as priming of stereotypes and mood states, underlie what we commonly know as intuition. 

Consider how such finding affect your betting. From being in the room of someone saying they made a mistake when placing a bet to reading of a failed gambler's tales. Fill your world with positivity.