And here are some examples of the conscious mind making free and uncoerced choices.
Quote:Suppose you volunteered to be a subject in the following experiment. First, the experimenter hands you some word problems and tells you to come and get her when you are finished. The word problems are easy: Just unscramble sets of five words and make sentences using four of them. For example, "they her bother see usually" becomes either "they usually see her" or "they usually bother her." A few minutes later, when you have finished the test, you go out to the hallway as instructed. The experimenter is there, but she's engaged in a conversation with someone and isn't making eye contact with you. What do you suppose you'll do? Well, if half the sentences you unscrambled contained words related to rudeness (such as bother, brazen, aggressively), you will probably interrupt the experimenter within a minute or two to say, "Hey, I'm finished. What should I do now? " But if you unscrambled sentences in which the rude words were swapped with words related to politeness ("they her respect see usually"), the odds are you'll just sit there meekly and wait until the experimenter acknowledges you — ten minutes from now.
Likewise, exposure to words related to the elderly makes people walk more slowly; words related to professors make people smarter at the game of Trivial Pursuit; and words related to soccer hooligans make people dumber. And these effects don't even depend on your consciously reading the words; the same effects can occur when the words are presented subliminally, that is, flashed on a screen for just a few hundredths of a second, too fast for your conscious mind to register them. But some part of the mind does see the words, and it sets in motion behaviors that psychologists can measure.
(ibid)