Soft-wired , perhaps.

The brain is a lazy thing. It falls into patterns easily, it takes mental shortcuts whereever it can. All that comes from our evolutionary history, where energy (literal energy for thinking) was limited.

Your subconscious mind handles all the everyday trivia to maintain your existence in a low energy way, and your mind is very quick to shunt things down that low energy path. That path is all our "instincts" (fight or flight, nurturing instincts, forming into groups etc etc ) and is based upon nomadic living in the savannah plains of Africa three million years ago.

If someone presents something in a way that can easily fall into one of our evolutionary shortcuts then your subconscious will run with it without you even realising.