To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy. Back during the presidential election, George W. Bush's campaign aired an attack ad against Al Gore's health-care plan that featured a bizarre quirk. Gore staffers first brought it to the attention of the New York Times, which ran a story in which several experts said it looked like an attempt at subliminal messaging.
Bush denied it — and the ad was pulled. The fracas was part of a debate that's surrounded advertising for many decades: Do subliminal messages actually work? Are we at the mercy of unconscious cues being pumped into our heads by unscrupulous corporations? Or is this all just a bunch of nonsense? Many psychologists, for their part, are skeptical of how much subliminal messages can do. He wrote an interesting post recently on subliminal messages over at Psychology Today.
However, subliminal messages do exist. And they can influence people in all different sorts of subtle ways. Researchers have been studying them for decades, and here's what we know now:.
The popular concept of subliminal messages was shaped by a famous study in which researchers claimed that flashing "Drink Coca-Cola" messages in a movie theater got people to buy more soft drinks. But this study was actually a total hoax. Back in , James M.
Vicary and Frances Thayer said they'd spent six weeks showing messages on movie screens so quickly that moviegoers didn't realize that they were there. The messages? Popcorn sales went up 58 percent, and cola sales went up 18 percent. The effect was stunning. There was just one problem. This study was a total hoax, Vicary later admitted , made up to boost his marketing company.
And other researchers were never able to replicate the results. Yet that story still lives on in many minds as fact. While the Coca-Cola movie-theater study was a hoax, it seems to have inspired a line of research about what subliminal messages can do to make people thirstier. And there have been some intriguing results here.
In , researchers at Princeton University published a study in which they subliminally added 12 frames of the word "thirsty" and 12 frames of an image of a Coca-Cola can into an episode of The Simpsons. Even though subjects couldn't guess what had been added, they rated themselves as about 27 percent thirstier after the show than before it. Those in the control group, who were only shown plain white frames, were marginally less thirsty after the show.
The researchers also got similar results using images of a Coca-Cola can and a sweaty boxer. A similar study published in by researchers at Utrecht University and Radboud University in the Netherlands demonstrated that subliminal messages could affect someone's affinity for a particular brand, in this case Lipton Ice. Participants who were subliminally primed with the words "Lipton Ice" were more likely to choose this beverage when given a choice between two drinks.
However, this effect only happened if the participants were already thirsty. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue. See Subscription Options. Discover World-Changing Science. Get smart. Sign up for our email newsletter.
Sign Up. Support science journalism. Knowledge awaits. See Subscription Options Already a subscriber? Some experts believe he never completed the original experiment at all. Related: How accurate Is the Myers-Briggs personality test? But there's really not much on which to base that conclusion," said Ian Zimmerman, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota Duluth.
However, the method is not completely made up. But its power is hedged by many if 's, including whether the audience is in the mood for the product being advertised.
In theory, subliminal messages deliver an idea that the conscious mind doesn't detect. The brain may ignore the information because it is delivered quickly. Bush campaign launched to smear presidential candidate Al Gore during the election. Whether these attempts affected voters and consumers is unknown. But scientists do know that subliminal messaging works in the lab.
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