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From: Ruth Bennett <rbennett@darkwing.uoregon.edu>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
Subject: Subliminal ads redux
Date: Sun, 16 Feb 1997 18:59:04 -0800

Some time ago I presented a half-assed protest of the FAQ's determination that subliminal ads were ineffective. Having struck a motherlode of supporting information in the course of actually doing what they pay me for, I now humbly submit this three-quarters-assed attempt. I suggest:

T. Subliminal advertising, widely considered ineffective, is banned anyway. T. The principles behind subliminal advertising are based on sound empirical data, and would work brilliantly if advertising execs knew how to read a scientific journal.

Please note that all supporting references are more recent than the ones currently given in the FAQ and are from refereed journals (of which the "Skeptical Inquirer", say, is not).

_How does subliminal advertising work?_

Dejanews my previous post for the mechanism. For a short recap, suffice it to say that some processes, especially word-reading in adults, are automated (non-attentional) in our cognition -- attention is a spotlight that we turn on a tiny subset of the amount of information that actually makes it from our eyes to our brain. Our eye is a minorly-adapted standard-issue mammalian eye, and is quite capable of all sorts of rapid-processing feats that generate informational input that would not only be unhelpful, but would downright injuriously overwhelm us if the norm were full conscious awareness of all the stimuli in our environment. We have evolutionary templates that respond to cues like duration, intensity, and similarity to phylogenetically longstanding cues to danger (things that loom, slither, or introduce themselves as attorneys) and cheerfully and routinely throw out everything else. (Don't believe me? Place a firm thumb over your eyeball next to your nose <yup -- it's got to be THAT one and not the OTHER eyeball>, and watch your visual field go black. Your eyes are still working, but by preventing the constant tiny motion of the ocular muscles, the visual image is made unnaturally stable, and your brain loses interest.)

_The info gets in, but do the effects get out?_

Yes. Social psychologists have long used tachistoscopes to present flashes of words which cannot subsequently be identified on a list, but which affect interpretation of an ambiguous stimulus. (See Bargh et al., 1986, for a typical procedure; Higgins 1989 for typical results). More compellingly, others (Devine, 1989) have used subliminal presentations to elicit stereotypical ratings of a target minority. (Subjects are almost always reluctant to make stereotypical attributions in the laboratory *without* such priming; see, for instance, Judd et al., 1995.)

Even more to the point for evaluating the effects of subliminal processing on later actual *behavior*, Neuberg (1988) discovered that dispositionally-competitive subjects presented subliminally with "competitiveness-related" stimuli increased the hostility of their choices in a subsequent Prisoner's Dilemma game in comparison to dispositionally-competitive subjects presented subliminally with neutral stimuli.

Does this mean that subliminal "sex" in a vodka ad is going to induce a higher purchase rate only among dispositional vodka-drinkers? (Or the dispositionally oversexed?)

Well, it couldn't hurt. But something that's been left out of the debate thus far is that subliminal presentations can also trigger that hoary old social psych finding that familiarity increases liking. In fact, familiarity increases liking even better when people aren't aware they're becoming familiar with something. (Generally, when we're aware of the source of our attitudes -- and especially when this familiarity/liking relationship has entered into folk wisdom -- we consciously adjust them.) I could give you a full half-dozen cites for this, but I'll just give a couple -- Mandler et al., 1987; Seamon et al., 1984) and note one in particular: Bornstein et al. (1988), who presented subjects with subliminal presentations of photographs and then discovered that in a subsequent discussion with photographees and others, subjects agreed more with the positions expressed by those in the photographs.

Gee, that couldn't relate to advertising, could it?

Still don't believe me? Fine, believe Bargh (1994): "There is no longer any doubt, given the abundance of evidence, that environmental stimuli processed outside of awareness can have important interpretive and evaluative consequences on subsequent conscious thought and behavior...Skeptics of the existence of subconscious processing phenomena have demanded and received rigorous tests, rather than mere claims, of subliminality. Perhaps this increased experimental rigor has done the most to achieve general acceptance of subliminal phenomena...social cognition researchers have been careful to ensure that subjects are not aware of the content or meaning of the subliminally presented stimuli through the use of sensitive forced-choice recognition measures, momentary awareness (as opposed to later memory) tests, and sophisticated pattern-masking procedures." (p. 9-10)

I could go on...

_So why can't the marketing folks make it work?_

<shrug> I'd guess it's their experimental protocol. Remember, there's two
claims here: (1) subliminal presentation increases tendencies in those with such proclivities already, and (2) repeated subliminal presentation will increase liking for the message or object in everyone, through the familiarity (WELL-established) route. So, if marketers take a random sample, they're gonna get equivalent amounts of all sorts of dispositions, and not get any kind of main effect on the first claim. If they then give up, or use a different sample for each presentation, or fail to sufficiently iterate their presentations, they're not going to discover the second one either.

This is, of course, just the social cognition literature. If the FAQ stays in error I could always start going through the support from cognitive neuroscience..

-Ruth "but that'd be going from the subliminal to the ridiculous" Bennett

References

Bargh, J. A. (1994). The four horsemen of automaticity: Awareness, Intention, Efficiency, and Control in Social Cognition. In R. S. Wyer & T. K. Srull (Eds.), Handbook of Social Cognition Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Bargh, J. A., Bond, R. N., Lombardi, W. J., & Tota, M. E. (1986). The additive nature of chronic and temporary sources of construct accessibility. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50, 869-878.

Bornstein, R. F., Leone, D. R., & Galley, D. J. (1988). The generalizations of subliminal mere exposure effects: Influence of stimuli perceived without awareness on social behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53, 265-289.

Devine, P. G. (1989). Stereotypes and prejudice: Their automatic and controlled components. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 56, 5-18.

Higgins, E. T. (1989). Knowledge accessibility and activation: Subjectivity and suffering from unconscious sources. In J. S. Uleman & J. A. Bargh (Eds.), Unintended thought New York: Guilford.

Judd, C. M., Park, B., Ryan, C. S., & Brauer, M. (1995). Stereotypes and ethnocentrism: Diverging interethnic perceptions of African American and White American youth. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69, 460-481.

Mandler, G., Nakamura, Y., & Zandt, B. J. S. V. (1987). Nonspecific effects of exposure to stimuli that cannot be recognized. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 13, 646-648.

Neuberg, S. L. (1988). Behavioral implications of informtion presented outside conscious awareness: The effect of subliminal presentation of trait information on behavior in the Prisoner's Dilemma game. Social Cognition, 6, 207-230.

Seamon, J. G., Marsh, R. L., & Brody, N. (1984). Critical importance of exposure duration for affective discrimination of stimuli that are not recognized. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 10, 465-469.