Yes. Not all forcing is of the "gun pointed at you" kind.
There's also: peer pressure, fads, media coverage, changing demands from employers, etc.
The only valid excuse here is your employer, but in that case you should be able justify why using X is better than Y. If your non-technical manager insists that you use something that you don't want to because its hip you should be running away from that employer as quickly as possible.
Not really. That's some conscious processing that you did, and that we can do -- but only to certain degree. When we go and buy stuff, the advertisments we've seen affect us, not just in what brand we'll buy, but in the very basic act of buying something over nothing, and how much we'll buy of a product.
It's a whole, much studied, field with tons of tunable parameters, from the psychology of a tv, to the height of stuff in Costo's shelves, the colors and smells inside a supermarket (and lots of stuff for web shops too), down to the $x.99 kind of pricing.
Sociological studies have proven time and again that this is not the case -- including in people that think that that's impossible for themselves (sort of like the Dunning–Kruger effect).
also, if you're going to assert there are studies that make your conclusion somehow not an ideology, then the actual citations would be good. and they'll have to be fairly interesting to convince me. sociology is full of outright fraud, without even considering all the papers suffering from poor experimental design and rampant conclusion jumping.