I once took an economics class in college, and the instructor must have been facinated by subliminal advertising (he spent a month teaching us about it). He told us that ‘sex’ was writtin on ritz crackers and plastered all over the covers of all the popular magazines. He showed us slides that ranged from depicting a guy getting his head decapitated within the ice cubes of a liquor ad, to a playboy cover that supposedly showed a guy dressed as a girl (the theory that it would subliminally appeal to the fear of homosexually in males and make them buy the mag)
My question is…has anyone ever fessed up to actually doing this or is it just all in our heads.
call me a heathen and burn me at the stake, but i wouldnt go so far as to saying it is bunk, regardless of what Cecil says. :rolleyes:
in linguistics, there is a branch of experiments that rely on a technique called priming. one methodology is something called a “primed lexical decision task”. the participant is told that he will be flashed som words on a computer screen and he has to press ‘yes’/‘no’ keys as fast as he can to decide if the word is legal or not. so “chair” is a legal word, but “chayr” is not. what actually happens is that before the participant is shown the target word, another word, called a prime, is flashed extremely briefly (45msec or so). this is definitely not something that can be actively perceived by the average person. what has been found is that if this prime is a semantic relation to the target (for example, the prime is “table”), then people are able to decide significantly faster that “chair” is a legal word. this effect has been replicated by countless experiments. i’ve participated in some and conducted one myself.
further if you refer to papers by Hardaway (1990) and Slipp (2000), they conduct an analysis of a large number of experiments on subliminal activation, they do find evidence for subliminal activation. even if you are willing to discount this, most meta-analytic reviews conclude that while there may be no clear support for subliminal psychodynamic activation, there is no clear support against it either.
But aasna, what you are referring to is different than what the debunking articles are referring to. You aren’t saying that the experiments make people think “Man, I should go buy me a new table.”
All those experiments show is that people can recognize a word flashed quickly and that such recognition has some kind of effect on them (which is interesting in and of itself, don’t get me wrong), but those experiments don’t show that flashing words or images have the effect of making a person more likely to buy anything.
i see that…thanks taxguy!
my post was more “related stuff” than actually about advertising and subliminal messages.
okay, what i said in my previous post was:
(1) the idea of subliminal prompting having an actual effect is not rubbish.
(2) very recent research has not completely disproved the fact that subliminal messages may affect human behaviour.
about the OP, i just went looking for subliminal messages and advertising and found this very cool study (Trappey, 1996), which says:
Further warning! that ‘third one’ that is audio (in TPWombat’s link) consists of a quiet section of audio with faint scrolling words (so you turn up the volume and look intently at the screen), then a very loud screaming noise and a series of scary face images.
Sorry if this spoils the fun, but I am alone in the house, it is 2AM and that just scared the shit out of me, furthermore, I think the mods have asked us not to post links to screaming faces.
Since the whole concept has been pretty thoroughly discredited I would expect all Dopers send $20 to Biffy the Elephant Shrew today to be too smart for that sort of thing.
Hey Biffy the Elephant Shrew, I feel a sudden urge to send you $20, but I don’t know your bank account number. Could you mail it to me, together with your real name, adres, private telephone and fax numbers? I’ll help you assist in the transference of $47,500,000 from a suspended account in The Central Bank Of Nigeria Apex Bank, which will earn you a 25% fee.
Warning: don’t try this at home. Google for “Nigerian scam” if you must.
The main thing the “subliminal seduction” theory has going for it is Wilson Bryan Key, who popularized the idea in a series of successful books. The main thing going against it is Wilson Bryan Key, whose books read like a crock of the well-known article.
Key can find a dirty picture anywhere. In his later books he merely draws pictures on top of advertising images and insists that there was a dirty picture underneath which he can see, even if no one else can. This is the case with his most notorious example; he claimed to have first discovered subliminal advertising when looking at a photo of a plate of fried clams and realizing that they are not fried clams at all, but a bunch of naked people having an orgy.
Similarly, Key claimed that the reason people admire the painting Syndics of the Cloth Guild (the picture on the Dutch Masters cigar box) is not because Rembrandt was a sublime artist, but because he painted the word “sex” on the wall in the back of the picture.
Sure enough, the word is there–after Key draws it in. Try as I may, I can’t find anything resembling it in the unretouched image.
Key does not address the interesting question of why Rembrandt, who was Dutch, would use an English word in his painting. The Dutch word for “sex” is “geslachtsdaad”. Nobody ever said Dutch was the language of love.
My WAG is that advertisers really have used subliminal techniques from time to time, operating on the fear that maybe everybody else really is doing it. The fact that nobody ever comes forth and writes a tell-all book with a title like “I Airbrushed Nudes in Ice Cubes for Madison Avenue” is, I think, a serious blow to the theory that it is a widespread phenonena.
