One of my pages linked on a Wikipedia entry

Woohoo! I was reading about Robert Cialdini’s idea of commitments “growing their own legs”, and found that on his entry on Wikipedia had a link to an interview with him that I had posted on my page. It was originally at another site, but was taken down a few years ago. Since link was to my University of Colorado account, and that will be gone soon, I updated it.

The concept of a decision’s “growing its own legs” is powerful. This page has many excerpts from Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion on the subject. Briefly, it’s the idea that if you initially make a decision D1 for reason R1, then your mind comes up with other reasons (“legs”, that hold up D1) to justify the decision so that even when R1 no longer applies, you still think D1 is a good choice because of all the other reasons “legs” you’ve come up with.

In the book he suggests (if I recall correctly) asking yourself “Knowing what I know now, would I make the same decision again?” The above page quotes him: “Accumulating psychological evidence indicates that we experience our feelings toward something a split second before we can intellectualize about it. My suspicion is that the message sent by the heart of hearts is a pure, basic feeling. Therefore, if we train ourselves to be attentive, we should register it ever so slightly before our own cognitive apparatus engages.” Sounds like what Malcolm Gladwell talks about in Blink.