The holidays are almost here. As stores prepare for the impending spending orgy, advertising is more important than ever. It seems that behind every carefree commercial smile is a team of frantic ad-mongers doing their best to make you buy.
The advertising industry has been notorious for using subliminal persuasion to sell their products. Whether it’s the words “eat popcorn” flashed imperceptibly across a movie screen, or the word “sex” cleverly hidden in an advert, stories of the use and abuse of subliminal messages sound like a page out of 1950s government conspiracy theories. From alcohol ads to rock songs played backwards, and of course, the infamous Disney sex messages, it looks like everyone’s trying to get a grip on our unconscious. But does subliminal persuasion work? And if so, how?
According to theories of subliminal perception, a message is subliminal if it is delivered below the threshold of awareness. In other words, it can’t be perceived by the conscious mind, but is picked up by the unconscious. For example, if an image flashes at just a few milliseconds in length, we won’t be able to perceive it consciously, but our unconscious mind will still process it.
In a classic 1957 experiment by market researcher James Vicary, the words “eat popcorn” and “drink Coke” were flashed at a third of a millisecond across a movie screen at five second intervals. After six weeks, he claimed that Coca Cola sales went up by 18 per cent, and popcorn by 58 per cent. However, when the CBC conducted a similar experiment in 1958 by flashing the message “phone now” 352 times during a popular Sunday night television show, not a single viewer called. The CBC then asked viewers to guess the message that was subliminally sent to them. While there were no correct answers, almost half of the viewers—aware of Vicary’s study—claimed that they had felt hungry or thirsty during the show. Vicary would later admit to falsifying his data.
Opinion polls show that most Americans believe in the persuasive power of subliminal messages. However, most psychologists argue that the effects of subliminal persuasion are smallto practically non-existent. Scientific research has failed to support claims of its effectiveness, and in general, studies show that we can only minimally process simple subliminal messages—for example, a single word—but not more complex messages.
Most studies claiming the effectiveness of subliminal persuasion have been proved methodologically unsound. The well-constructed experiments used to test subliminal persuasion have pointed overwhelmingly to its ineffectiveness. Studies on the effects of messages played in reverse have shown that listening to these messages does not influence subjects’ judgment, and that people can hear hidden messages even when there are none. In the experiment, subjects couldn’t even distinguish between backward nursery rhymes, advertising messages, Christian, satanic, or pornographic content.
So if subliminal persuasion has been disproven by so many scientific studies, why does the general public seem to cling so fervently to the myth? It could be the persistence of die-hard advertisers who haven’t learned their lesson, or maybe it’s just a legend that never managed to die out. In any case, just to test this out once and for all, The Varsity has inserted a number of hidden subliminal messages throughout this article. So, are you thirsty yet?
