Myth #5
Subliminal Messages Can Persuade People to Purchase Products
Many of us know that psychologists and advertisers can present sights and sounds so briefly or so faintly that we fail to perceive them. But can those feeble stimuli influence our behavior in powerful ways? There' s a profitable industry that hopes you believe the answer is "yes." Some promoters push this kind of ultra-weak or "subliminal" messaging in the realm of advertising, whereas others have become leaders in the burgeoning self- help movement. The Internet, New Age fairs and magazines, supermarket tabloids, late-night TV "infomercials," and bookstores market subliminal audiotapes and CDs that promise to make the purchaser healthy, wealthy, and wise. Among our personal favorites, we include audiotapes that promise to enlarge women's breasts, relieve constipation, improve one's sex life, or cure deafness (although the mechanism by which a deaf person could detect subliminal sounds remains truly mysterious). Given the widespread promotion of subliminal persuasion in the popular psychology world, it's hardly surprising that 59% of the psychology undergraduates sampled by Larry Brown (1983), and 83% of those sampled by Annette Taylor and Patricia Kowalski (2003), said they believed it works. Interestingly, there's evidence that under tightly controlled laboratory conditions, psychologists can demonstrate short-lived and modest subliminal effects. In these experiments, researchers flash priming words or pictures on a screen so briefly that observers are unaware of what the flashes contain. In psychological lingo, priming stimuli increase the speed or accuracy with which we'll identify a later stimulus. Experimenters then determine whether the meanings or emotional content of the priming stimuli influence people' s responses to the task, like completing a word with missing letters or judging the emotion of a person in a photograph. For instance, Nicholas Epley and his colleagues (Epley, Savitsky, & Kachelski, 1999) described an experiment in which researchers asked psychology students to generate ideas for research projects. The investigators then exposed the students to extremely brief flashes featuring either the smiling face of a colleague or the scowling face of their faculty supervisor. The students perceived the stimuli as nothing but flashes of light. Next, they rated the q y of the
colleague or the scowling face of their faculty supervisor. The students perceived the stimuli as nothing but flashes of light. Next, they rated the quality of the research ideas they'd produced. Without knowing why, subjects exposed to the flash featuring the scowling face of their supervisor rated their own ideas less favorably dian those exposed to the smiling colleague's face. Investigators can similarly influence verbal behaviors, as when a shared theme in a series of subliminally flashed priming words increases the odds that a person will choose a related word from a list of alternatives (Merikle. 1992). For example. if we present a subject with the word stem "gui " and ask her to form a complete word, "guide" and "guile" are both options. Research shows that we can boost the probability of subjects choosing "guide" by priming them subliminally with words like "direct," "lead," and "escort," whereas we can boost the probability of their choosing "guile" by priming them subliminally with words like "deceit," "treachery," and "duplicity." "Subliminal" means "under the limen." The limen, better known as the "sensory threshold," is the narrow range in which a diminishing stimulus goes from being just barely detectable to being just barely undetectable. If the stimulus happens to be a word or phrase, the first hurdle it must pass is the simple detection threshold. That's the point at which people first become dimly aware that the researcher has presented anything, even though åey can't identify what they saw or heard. The researcher must present the stimulus for a longer interval and at a higher intensity to reach the next stage of awareness, the recognition threshold. At that point, people can say precisely what ffey heard or saw. If a stimulus has so little energy, or is so fforoughly obscured by noise that it can't trigger a physiological response in the eye's or ear's receptors, it can't affect anything the person thinks, feels, or does. Period. Messages that inhabit the gray zone between the detection and recognition thresholds. or that we simnlv aren't attending to. sometimes influence our emotions or behavior. The subliminal self-help industry hopes you'll swallow the claim that your brain understands and acts on the complex meanings of phrases diat are presented at vanishingly weak levels or overshadowed by stronger stimuli. Moreover, they claim that these sneaky subliminal stimuli are especially effective because they worm their way into your unconscious, where they can pull your stings like a hidden puppeteer. Should you be worried? Read on. Modern psychology accepts that much of our mental processing goes on outside of our immediate awareness—that our brains work on many tasks at once without monitoring them consciously (Kihlstrom, 1987; Lynn & Rhue, 1994). Nevertheless, diis is a far cry from the kind of non-conscious processing envisioned by pop psychology proponents of subliminal effects. Subliminal entrepreneurs are holdovers from the heyday of strict Freudian views of the unconscious, which most scientific psychologists have long abandoned (Bowers, 1987). Like Freud, subliminal enffusiasts see the unconscious as the seat of primitive sexual urges diat operate outside of our awareness to compel our choices. Writer Vance Packard popularized this view of the unconscious in his 1957 smash bestseller, The Hidden Persuaders. Packard accepted uncritically théßtory of
Writer Vance Packard popularized this view of the unconscious in his 1957 smash bestseller, The Hidden Persuaders. Packard accepted uncritically the story of marketing consultant James Vicary, who supposedly conducted a successful demonstration of subliminal advertising at a Fort Lee, New Jersey movie theatre. Vicary claimed that during a movie, he repeated exposed cinema patrons to messages flashed on the screen for a mere 1/3,000 of a second, urging them to buy popcorn and Coca-Cola. He proclaimed that although movie-goers were unaware of these commands, sales of popcom and Coca-Cola skyrocketed during the six- week duration of his "experiment." Vicary's findings achieved widespread popular acceptance, although he never submitted them to the scrutiny of a scientific journal, nor has anyone been able to replicate them. After much criticism, Vicary finally admitted in 1962 that he'd made up the whole story in an effort to revive his failing consulting business (Moore, 1992; Pratkanis, 1992). Vicary' s confession failed to discourage even more far-fetched accusations that the advertisers were subliminally manipulating the unsuspecting public. In a series of books with such titillating titles as Subliminal Seduction (1973), former psychology professor Wilson Brian Key claimed that advertisers were conspiring to influence consumer choices by embedding blurred sexual images into magazine and TV renderings of ice cubes, plates of food, models' hair-dos, and even Ritz crackers. Key gravely warned that even a single exposure to these camouflaged images could affect consumer choices weeks later. Although Key presented no real evidence to back up his claims, public alarm led the U .S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to look into his allegations. Although the FCC couldn't find any evidence that subliminal advertising worked, they declared it "contrary to the public interest" and warned licensed broadcasters to steer clear of it. Moreover, in an attempt to soothe public jitters, several advertising trade associations imposed voluntary restrictions, asking their members to refrain from attempts to punch below the liminal belt. Although Vicary was an admitted fraud and Key never put his strange ideas to a proper test, some still believed that subliminal persuasion claims were worth examining. So in 1958, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) performed an unprecedented nationwide test. During a popular Sunday night TV program, it informed viewers that the network was about to conduct a test of subliminal persuasion. The CBC then flashed subliminally the message "phone now" on the screen 352 times throughout the show. Telephone company records indicated that phone usage didn't increase, nor did local television stations report a big upsurge in calls. Nevertheless, a few viewers, who may have known about Vicary's alleged results, called in to say they felt hungrier and thirstier following the program. The results of more carefully controlled tests of the ability of subliminal messages to influence consumer choices or voter attitudes were also overwhelmingly negative (Eich & Hyman, 1991; Logie & Della Sala, 1999; Moore, 1992; Pratkanis, 1992). To this day, there's no good evidence that subliminal messages can affect purchasers' decisions or voters' choices, let alone yield perfect memories or larger breasts. Perhaps most bizarre of all were claims that heavy metal rock bands, such as Judas Priest, were inserting backward recordings of Satanic messages in their music. Alarmists claimed these messages encouraged suicidal behavior, although what conceivable purpose entertainers might have in killing off potential @ •Peip remains unclear. Some even asserted that it was all a plot to subvert the morality of youthful music fans. Many would maintain that youth generally quite well without any special subliminal help, but no matter.
John Vokey and J. Don Read (1985) put the idea of subliminal backward messages to a controlled test. In one particularly amusing demonstration, they found that participants with prudish leanings, given subtle suggestions as to what they were about to hear, were likely to perceive nonexistent pornographic material in reverse-played Biblical passages. These results suggest that people who claim to hear Satanic messages embedded in commercial sound tracks are allowing their overheated imaginations to read die lewd material into meaningless sound patterns. It's all in the ear of the beholder. Tests of self-help subliminal products have been equally discouraging. Anthony Greenwald and his colleagues (Greenwald, Spangenberg, Pradcanis, & Eskenazi, 1991) conducted a double-blind test of commercially marketed subliminal audiotapes that purport to enhance memory or self-esteem. They told half of the participants they were getting the memory boosting tapes, the other half they were getting die self-esteem boosting tapes. Within each of these groups, half got the tapes they were expecting and half got the tapes with the offer message. Participants reported that they improved in ways consistent with whichever kind of tape they believed they received. Those who received the self-esteem tapes, believing they were die memory boosters, were just as happy with their apparent memory improvement as those who got the real McCoy, and vice versa. This curious finding led Greenwald and his colleagues to refer to this phenomenon as an illusory placebo effect: People didn't improve, but ffey thought they had. Despite convincing debunking of the concept by the scientific community. subliminal advertisements still pop up occasionally. During the 2000 U.S. presidential election, sharp-eyed Democrats spotted, in a Republican TV attack ad aimed at candidate A1 Gore, an extremely brief flash of the word "RATS" superimposed on Gore's face (Berke, 2000). The ad's creator claimed that die fact that the last four letters of the intended word "BUREACRATS" justhappened to become detached from this longer word was entirely accidental (see Eigur_1Z. Nevertheless, advertising production experts said that given the advanced technology used to prepare the ad, an unintentional insertion of this kind was unlikely. Was the inclusion of the word ("RATS"), which appeared subliminally in this 2000 Republican campaign advertisement against Democratic candidate A1 Gore, intentional? Source: Reuters/Corbis_
Subliminal Messages Can Persuade People to Purchase Products
Many of us know that psychologists and advertisers can present sights and sounds so briefly or so faintly that we fail to perceive them. But can those feeble stimuli influence our behavior in powerful ways? There' s a profitable industry that hopes you believe the answer is "yes." Some promoters push this kind of ultra-weak or "subliminal" messaging in the realm of advertising, whereas others have become leaders in the burgeoning self- help movement. The Internet, New Age fairs and magazines, supermarket tabloids, late-night TV "infomercials," and bookstores market subliminal audiotapes and CDs that promise to make the purchaser healthy, wealthy, and wise. Among our personal favorites, we include audiotapes that promise to enlarge women's breasts, relieve constipation, improve one's sex life, or cure deafness (although the mechanism by which a deaf person could detect subliminal sounds remains truly mysterious). Given the widespread promotion of subliminal persuasion in the popular psychology world, it's hardly surprising that 59% of the psychology undergraduates sampled by Larry Brown (1983), and 83% of those sampled by Annette Taylor and Patricia Kowalski (2003), said they believed it works. Interestingly, there's evidence that under tightly controlled laboratory conditions, psychologists can demonstrate short-lived and modest subliminal effects. In these experiments, researchers flash priming words or pictures on a screen so briefly that observers are unaware of what the flashes contain. In psychological lingo, priming stimuli increase the speed or accuracy with which we'll identify a later stimulus. Experimenters then determine whether the meanings or emotional content of the priming stimuli influence people' s responses to the task, like completing a word with missing letters or judging the emotion of a person in a photograph. For instance, Nicholas Epley and his colleagues (Epley, Savitsky, & Kachelski, 1999) described an experiment in which researchers asked psychology students to generate ideas for research projects. The investigators then exposed the students to extremely brief flashes featuring either the smiling face of a colleague or the scowling face of their faculty supervisor. The students perceived the stimuli as nothing but flashes of light. Next, they rated the q y of the
colleague or the scowling face of their faculty supervisor. The students perceived the stimuli as nothing but flashes of light. Next, they rated the quality of the research ideas they'd produced. Without knowing why, subjects exposed to the flash featuring the scowling face of their supervisor rated their own ideas less favorably dian those exposed to the smiling colleague's face. Investigators can similarly influence verbal behaviors, as when a shared theme in a series of subliminally flashed priming words increases the odds that a person will choose a related word from a list of alternatives (Merikle. 1992). For example. if we present a subject with the word stem "gui " and ask her to form a complete word, "guide" and "guile" are both options. Research shows that we can boost the probability of subjects choosing "guide" by priming them subliminally with words like "direct," "lead," and "escort," whereas we can boost the probability of their choosing "guile" by priming them subliminally with words like "deceit," "treachery," and "duplicity." "Subliminal" means "under the limen." The limen, better known as the "sensory threshold," is the narrow range in which a diminishing stimulus goes from being just barely detectable to being just barely undetectable. If the stimulus happens to be a word or phrase, the first hurdle it must pass is the simple detection threshold. That's the point at which people first become dimly aware that the researcher has presented anything, even though åey can't identify what they saw or heard. The researcher must present the stimulus for a longer interval and at a higher intensity to reach the next stage of awareness, the recognition threshold. At that point, people can say precisely what ffey heard or saw. If a stimulus has so little energy, or is so fforoughly obscured by noise that it can't trigger a physiological response in the eye's or ear's receptors, it can't affect anything the person thinks, feels, or does. Period. Messages that inhabit the gray zone between the detection and recognition thresholds. or that we simnlv aren't attending to. sometimes influence our emotions or behavior. The subliminal self-help industry hopes you'll swallow the claim that your brain understands and acts on the complex meanings of phrases diat are presented at vanishingly weak levels or overshadowed by stronger stimuli. Moreover, they claim that these sneaky subliminal stimuli are especially effective because they worm their way into your unconscious, where they can pull your stings like a hidden puppeteer. Should you be worried? Read on. Modern psychology accepts that much of our mental processing goes on outside of our immediate awareness—that our brains work on many tasks at once without monitoring them consciously (Kihlstrom, 1987; Lynn & Rhue, 1994). Nevertheless, diis is a far cry from the kind of non-conscious processing envisioned by pop psychology proponents of subliminal effects. Subliminal entrepreneurs are holdovers from the heyday of strict Freudian views of the unconscious, which most scientific psychologists have long abandoned (Bowers, 1987). Like Freud, subliminal enffusiasts see the unconscious as the seat of primitive sexual urges diat operate outside of our awareness to compel our choices. Writer Vance Packard popularized this view of the unconscious in his 1957 smash bestseller, The Hidden Persuaders. Packard accepted uncritically théßtory of
Writer Vance Packard popularized this view of the unconscious in his 1957 smash bestseller, The Hidden Persuaders. Packard accepted uncritically the story of marketing consultant James Vicary, who supposedly conducted a successful demonstration of subliminal advertising at a Fort Lee, New Jersey movie theatre. Vicary claimed that during a movie, he repeated exposed cinema patrons to messages flashed on the screen for a mere 1/3,000 of a second, urging them to buy popcorn and Coca-Cola. He proclaimed that although movie-goers were unaware of these commands, sales of popcom and Coca-Cola skyrocketed during the six- week duration of his "experiment." Vicary's findings achieved widespread popular acceptance, although he never submitted them to the scrutiny of a scientific journal, nor has anyone been able to replicate them. After much criticism, Vicary finally admitted in 1962 that he'd made up the whole story in an effort to revive his failing consulting business (Moore, 1992; Pratkanis, 1992). Vicary' s confession failed to discourage even more far-fetched accusations that the advertisers were subliminally manipulating the unsuspecting public. In a series of books with such titillating titles as Subliminal Seduction (1973), former psychology professor Wilson Brian Key claimed that advertisers were conspiring to influence consumer choices by embedding blurred sexual images into magazine and TV renderings of ice cubes, plates of food, models' hair-dos, and even Ritz crackers. Key gravely warned that even a single exposure to these camouflaged images could affect consumer choices weeks later. Although Key presented no real evidence to back up his claims, public alarm led the U .S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to look into his allegations. Although the FCC couldn't find any evidence that subliminal advertising worked, they declared it "contrary to the public interest" and warned licensed broadcasters to steer clear of it. Moreover, in an attempt to soothe public jitters, several advertising trade associations imposed voluntary restrictions, asking their members to refrain from attempts to punch below the liminal belt. Although Vicary was an admitted fraud and Key never put his strange ideas to a proper test, some still believed that subliminal persuasion claims were worth examining. So in 1958, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) performed an unprecedented nationwide test. During a popular Sunday night TV program, it informed viewers that the network was about to conduct a test of subliminal persuasion. The CBC then flashed subliminally the message "phone now" on the screen 352 times throughout the show. Telephone company records indicated that phone usage didn't increase, nor did local television stations report a big upsurge in calls. Nevertheless, a few viewers, who may have known about Vicary's alleged results, called in to say they felt hungrier and thirstier following the program. The results of more carefully controlled tests of the ability of subliminal messages to influence consumer choices or voter attitudes were also overwhelmingly negative (Eich & Hyman, 1991; Logie & Della Sala, 1999; Moore, 1992; Pratkanis, 1992). To this day, there's no good evidence that subliminal messages can affect purchasers' decisions or voters' choices, let alone yield perfect memories or larger breasts. Perhaps most bizarre of all were claims that heavy metal rock bands, such as Judas Priest, were inserting backward recordings of Satanic messages in their music. Alarmists claimed these messages encouraged suicidal behavior, although what conceivable purpose entertainers might have in killing off potential @ •Peip remains unclear. Some even asserted that it was all a plot to subvert the morality of youthful music fans. Many would maintain that youth generally quite well without any special subliminal help, but no matter.
John Vokey and J. Don Read (1985) put the idea of subliminal backward messages to a controlled test. In one particularly amusing demonstration, they found that participants with prudish leanings, given subtle suggestions as to what they were about to hear, were likely to perceive nonexistent pornographic material in reverse-played Biblical passages. These results suggest that people who claim to hear Satanic messages embedded in commercial sound tracks are allowing their overheated imaginations to read die lewd material into meaningless sound patterns. It's all in the ear of the beholder. Tests of self-help subliminal products have been equally discouraging. Anthony Greenwald and his colleagues (Greenwald, Spangenberg, Pradcanis, & Eskenazi, 1991) conducted a double-blind test of commercially marketed subliminal audiotapes that purport to enhance memory or self-esteem. They told half of the participants they were getting the memory boosting tapes, the other half they were getting die self-esteem boosting tapes. Within each of these groups, half got the tapes they were expecting and half got the tapes with the offer message. Participants reported that they improved in ways consistent with whichever kind of tape they believed they received. Those who received the self-esteem tapes, believing they were die memory boosters, were just as happy with their apparent memory improvement as those who got the real McCoy, and vice versa. This curious finding led Greenwald and his colleagues to refer to this phenomenon as an illusory placebo effect: People didn't improve, but ffey thought they had. Despite convincing debunking of the concept by the scientific community. subliminal advertisements still pop up occasionally. During the 2000 U.S. presidential election, sharp-eyed Democrats spotted, in a Republican TV attack ad aimed at candidate A1 Gore, an extremely brief flash of the word "RATS" superimposed on Gore's face (Berke, 2000). The ad's creator claimed that die fact that the last four letters of the intended word "BUREACRATS" justhappened to become detached from this longer word was entirely accidental (see Eigur_1Z. Nevertheless, advertising production experts said that given the advanced technology used to prepare the ad, an unintentional insertion of this kind was unlikely. Was the inclusion of the word ("RATS"), which appeared subliminally in this 2000 Republican campaign advertisement against Democratic candidate A1 Gore, intentional? Source: Reuters/Corbis_
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