Belief-first messages work because they reach the limbic brain, which makes decisions and has no capacity for language.

The claim

The mechanism offered for why belief-first communication works: the brain's newest layer handles analysis and language and matches the what, while an older limbic layer handles feeling, trust and all decision-making, matches the why and how, and has no language, which is why gut decisions cannot be put into words and are rationalised afterwards. Held at a low likelihood. From our own knowledge, not from the corpus: the three-layer brain model this rests on has been abandoned in neuroscience; the limbic system is not a discrete unit that controls behaviour; and decisions draw on prefrontal cortex as much as on older structures. The behavioural observation, that people often decide by feel and give reasons afterwards, has its own evidence and does not need this mechanism, so the golden circle survives the mechanism failing.