(ALAMY)
This year marks the 50th anniversary of an article in Advertising Age magazine in which a marketing consultant named James Vicary admitted to perpetrating one of the great hoaxes in psychological science: the idea of subliminal advertising. Vicary had made his claims a few years earlier — just after the end of the Korean War, an era in which ideas like mind control and brainwashing had found a place in the public consciousness.
The surprise all these decades later is that Vicary wasn’t far off base after all.
Vicary’s hoax revolved around a movie theater in Fort Lee, NJ. Vicary had claimed that he arranged for the words “drink Coca-Cola” and “eat popcorn” to be flashed briefly on screen every five seconds during screenings of the film “Picnic.” Though the duration of each flash was too short for anyone to consciously detect, Vicary said that that this subliminal exposure boosted Coke sales by 18% and popcorn sales by 58%.
The press, always thirsty for a sensational story, loved Vicary’s. But advertisers, the FCC, and research psychologists were skeptical, and in the Advertising Age article Vicary admitted that he had never conducted the subliminal “experiment” — it was concocted as a gimmick to attract customers to his failing marketing business.
The admission came too late to erase the idea from the American psyche. The concept of subliminal advertising has remained a part of our culture, sometimes the source of paranoia, sometimes the subject of comedy — and sometimes the inspiration for serious efforts at persuasion. During the 2000 presidential election, for example, the campaign of candidate George W. Bush ran an ad aimed at his opponent, Al Gore, in which the word “RATS” was flashed in large white letters for a small fraction of a second. Bush’s campaign had apparently not heard about Vicary’s admission — they ran the ad about 4,000 times before the subterfuge was discovered and the ad pulled due to protests. Ethics aside, the ad sounds like a waste of money. But in 2008 Joel Weinberger, a political psychologist, inspired by Bush’s ad, ran a controlled scientific study and found that subliminally flashing the word “RATS” in a television ad can indeed increase the negative ratings of a politician.
As for Vicary’s original idea, influencing food choice, research shows that it, too, is possible, at least under laboratory conditions. For example, in 2005 scientists arranged for a group of volunteers to watch as the brand name “Lipton Ice” was flashed subliminally before their eyes. After the exposure the volunteers were given a choice of three beverages, one of which was Lipton Ice Tea; 85% of the subjects chose Lipton, as compared to only 20% of those who had not been exposed to the subliminal message.
The good news from such studies is that the effects seen in these literal replications of subliminal advertising seem to be fragile and difficult to replicate outside the lab. The worrisome news is that marketing based on the exploitation of unconscious processes can be very effective.
One of the most popular methods of hidden persuasion these days occurs in the very context Vicary had envisioned and is only slightly less subtle: product placement in films and television.
In the film “Spider-Man,” for example, a can of Dr Pepper was featured for about 4 seconds when Spider-Man (Tobey Maguire) shot a spider web from his wrist toward it. Though it is likely that few of the tens of millions exposed to that image consciously registered or remembered it, the makers of Dr Pepper bet that it would have a subliminal effect.
Research seems to bear that out. For example, in one recent experiment, 105 children were shown a brief clip from the film “Home Alone.” Half were shown a clip in which Pepsi was spilled on the table; the other half saw a clip involving milk. Afterward, the kids were offered a choice of Coke or Pepsi. Those who had seen the clip involving Pepsi were significantly more likely to choose Pepsi, even if they were not, after prompting, able to recall having seen it in the clip.
The Coke/Pepsi war is a good example of the subliminal effects of modern marketing because many people claim to have a strong preference for the taste of one or the other despite the fact that the drinks are nearly identical, and that taste tests have shown that these preferences are illusory. For example, in one study a researcher asked 30 cola drinkers whether they preferred Coke or Pepsi, then asked them to “test” their preference by tasting the two brands side by side. The great majority stuck to their guns on that taste test — even though the scientist had secretly put Coke in the Pepsi bottle and vice versa.
So, why do drinkers maintain such loyalty? The most telling study was performed a few years ago at the Baylor College of Medicine. Baylor scientists found that soda drinkers enjoyed Coke labeled as Coke a lot more than they enjoyed Coke when they did not know its identity. Then they went a step further: They administered taste tests while their subjects were having their brains imaged in an fMRI scanner.
They found that subjects drinking unlabeled Coke merely enjoyed the taste of the soda, but in subjects who drank Coke labeled as Coke, areas deep in the subjects’ midbrain — regions of unconscious processing associated with reward, emotion, and pleasure — sprung into action.
Though Coke drinkers will tell you their preference is based on taste, what they don’t know is that their unconscious is making the real decisions, based on criteria other than taste, and that they have been unknowingly manipulated by advertisers to react in that manner.
“[People] don’t understand the way in which messages can gain control over our behavior,” said Read Montague, one of the Baylor researchers. “We can show that the idea of Coca-Cola activates structures in your midbrain that literally drives your behavior.”
The insight came too late for Vicary, who died in 1977. But I think he would have liked that.
Leonard Mlodinow is a bestselling author and teaches at the California Institute of Technology. His new book is “Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior” (Pantheon).