People also feared skepticism and suspicion would be useless against this form of influence because after all, we can’t be suspicious of something we’re not even aware we’ve seen.Īfter learning about Vicary and Thayer’s study and reading Packard’s book, people feared advertisers could use subliminal advertising to force them to buy products and politicians could even use subliminal advertising to force them to vote a certain way. The fear of subliminal advertising was largely unfounded though, as Packard heavily exaggerated advertisers’ power over consumers, and Vicary and Thayer fabricated their data. That’s right, they just made it all up for no other reason than to promote Vicary’s own marketing company! Additionally, legitimate research (i.e., research that did not make use of fabricated data) conducted after the publication of Vicary and Thayer’s study found very little evidence that subliminal advertising exerted any influence on people. Despite this though, the myth that subliminal advertising has a powerful influence endures: Recent survey data showed over ¾ of respondents knew of subliminal advertising and almost half felt susceptible to it. If the fear of subliminal advertising is largely unfounded, this begs the question: Can we ever be influenced outside awareness? The answer, actually, is yes. Research showed that when words relating to thirst were subliminally presented to thirsty people they later drank more. This, despite the fact that these people did not report being thirstier! This implies these people were not only unaware of seeing the thirst related words, but were also unaware of the words’ influence on their behavior. Other research showed stimuli people were aware of could exert an influence on their behavior they were not aware of. For example, research showed that liquor store patrons bought more German wine when German music was playing in the store and more Italian wine when Italian music was playing in the store. When asked what led them to choose the wine they chose very few patrons mentioned the music, implying that despite the fact they could hear the music most of them were unaware it was influencing their behavior. In fact, subliminal presentation of words is a standard, run-of-the-mill tool pulled out by language scientists to test arcane theories of language that have nothing to do with mind control.Other research showed that people who watched someone eating ice cream before being given the chance to eat ice cream themselves would unknowingly eat the same amount of ice cream as that other person (the only time this didn’t happen was when that other person was obese, but that’s a story for another post). On the other hand, it's been known for decades that people do register the meanings of words flashed so briefly that they're unaware of them, and that these meanings affect their cognitive responses. One of the most basic facts about human language processing is that we're firmly bound by the linearity of language in time, meaning that we process it forwards with supreme efficiency, but find it mind-bendingly hard to do so backwards. Human beings are highly unlikely to extract the meanings of sentences spoken or sung backwards, let alone do so automatically and unconsciously. But if you know something about how linguistic messages are actually processed by human minds, it becomes harder to spread your skepticism around evenly between the two. On the face of it, subliminally associating the word RATS with Democrats might seem no more plausible as a strategy than recruiting followers for Satan by means of backwards song lyrics. Claims like these quickly gave birth to cottage industries of consumer education programs, marketing consultancies and subliminal self-help tapes.īut as a researcher of language, I couldn't quite get why it was obvious that the subliminal message wouldn't work. And a number of years later, an overwrought Wilson Bryan Key wrote Subliminal Seduction, in which he claimed that advertisers embedded images of sex, death, and bestiality in their ads to manipulate people into buying their products. James Vicary, a self-promoting market researcher, jumped in to take credit for the "experiment". In 1957, Vance Packard published his best-seller The Hidden Persuaders, in which he described how a New Jersey movie theater had flashed subliminal messages to "Eat popcorn" and "Drink Coca-Cola", thereby causing sales at the snack bar to spike. Historically, fears about mind control in the hands of marketers peaked several decades ago. And so it is with any persuasion tactics that hint of mind control. Of course, our political and economic systems rest on the narrative of freedom of individual choice, so it's not surprising that as a culture, we should experience spasms of angst just thinking about assaults on these freedoms.
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