I hesitate to the use description as "think," just biasing correlations for subsequent generations.
In any case, there is at least one work that shows that CoT may not be necessary and biasing the decoding path via logit probabilities is also promising. [1]
One could argue it still doesn't contradict the benefits of CoT, but I suspect there is nothing fundamental about CoT, except that we happened to have been pre-training on sequences that use certain prompts that were easy to conceive from a human's perspective.