Subliminal Messages For Improvement: Hearing The Silent
Subliminal messages are part of modern advertising and public-speaking techniques. They are professed to be able to change a person's thoughts or behavior without their consent or knowledge. There is no proof that these types of messages actually work, but they have been shown to have an effect on some people. The goal of subliminal advertising is not about simply getting consumers' attention for a product, but rather about making the consumers feel good about already owning a given product. Unconsciously, individuals can then buy more products by feeling the urge to spend money in order to experience this good feeling.
The first use of the term 'subliminal' was in an article in the May 1958 issue of Scientific American magazine. Two Canadian psychologists, James A. Vicary and Russell A. Morash, wrote about experiments aimed at influencing people so that they would buy more food. One experiment involved showing subjects a silent movie advertisement for steak, then asking them to make a choice between a medium rare steak or a rare steak. In another study, subjects watched an ad for a toothpaste product and were then asked to make a choice between tooth paste and mouthwash from among four products (a combination of both). In the case of the toothpaste study, a group of subjects was offered a $5 cash reward for not choosing mouthwash. In both studies, the high point ratings were consistently higher with the product brought up during the choice task. Later studies have shown that similar effects can also be achieved during verbal tasks. For example, that same month in 1958, Vicary and Morash conducted an experiment using a word association task with three participants and then subsequently rating them on their responses (6). The authors reported that they found an increase in heart rate up to 120 beats per minute, a significant rise in blood pressure over 120 mm Hg, and an increase in respiration rate between 15% and 50%.
This article spurred the new applied field of subliminal advertising, which has been a controversial topic ever since it was introduced.
A series of experiments conducted in the 1960's and 1970's by psychologists James E. Comorford and B.F. Skinner investigated the effects of subliminal messages on learning and behavior, using as many as 250 subjects (5). In their first experiment, the two researchers showed that people were more likely to name a white card "black" than to name a black card "white," when this choice needed to be made quickly after exposure to either the word black or white presented subliminally (i.e., in 1/30th of a second).