imagine you could in_iect an ad message directly into people's minds. bypassing ordinary perception. Consumers would be unable to challenge or ignore your communication because they would never notice it in the first place. Incredibly. in 1957 James V'icary claimed he had such a technique. The market researcher said that during a movie he had flashed the phrases \"Drinlr Coca-Cola1 and \"Hungry? Eat popcorn"= subliminally (shown the words so quickly people could not detect them). Vicary claimed that sales ofpopcorn and Coke shot up by 18 percent and 58 percent. respectively. The public took notice. As psychologist Anthony Pratkanis observed. \"people were outraged and frightened by a technique so devilish that it could bypass their conscious intellect and beam subliminal commands directly to their subconscious." Great Britain and Australia banned subliminal advertising and the FCC threatened to revoke the license of any TV station that showed subliminal ads. Concerns abated when Vicary could not reproduce his eects under supervised tests. He later admitted he made the whole thmg up But fascmation with sublimmal advertising reappeared in the early 70s when Wilson Bryan Key published books that claimed to find the word sax in hundreds of ads from ice cubes in a gin ad to the surface ofa Ritz cracker' And while almost nobody else could see these \"embeds. ' Key sold plenty of books Case closed\" Well. not quite. It helps to separate subliminal advertising (demonstrating that a real advertiser has affected product sales With a hidden message embedded in a commercial} from subliminal inuence (demonstrating that people can be affected by an undetectable message) Surprisingly. current evidence is conclustve' People can be ity'lttsnced subliminal? Demonstrating subliminal inuence requires a couple ofthings. First. you have to present the message [a picture. word. or phrase) so quickly that people can't tell it was there. Psychologists say that something shown for 120 milliseconds ([112 of a second) or less is undetectable Second. it has to be demonstrated that the message inuences people in some way For example. a group shown a subliminal message must thinlr. feel. or act differently from a control group that doesrft see the subliminal message. Dozens of published research studies have provided such demonstrations Consider one example A group of researchers wondered what would happen if people who are snake phobic are subliminally presented with a picture of a snake Phobics typically begin sweating and become anxious when they see a snake photograph. whereas most people are fine. So what happens if snake photos are presented subliminally? The researchers found that even though subjects could not "see" the snake pictures. they responded as ifthey could: Phobics were anxious. nonphobics were not. So much for the idea that we are immune to messages we can't detect. But snakes and phobias are far removed from the concerns of most advertisers. Advertisers want to influence buying behaviors. not fears. This brings us to research done by three business professors. Yael ZemacksRugar. James Bettman. and Gavan Fitzsimons. In an ingenious experiment. they subliminally presented words related to either sadness or guilt to study participants. Both sadness words (i.e.. and. miserable) and guilt words (guilty, blamerrorrhy} describe bad feelings. But people act differently when they feel sad as opposed to when they feel guilty. Sad people look for rewards to cheer themselves up. but guilty people deny themselves rewards. So the researchers predicted that in response to subliminal presentation of guilt words. guilt-prone people (as opposed to nonguilt-prone people) would be less Likely to buy themselves an mdulgence. Conversely in response to sad words. guiltsprone people as compared with others would be just as likely to buy an indulgence. in fact. their experiments demonstrated these patterns of results By subtiminally inuencing specific emotions. the researchers inuenced purchase behaviors. An even more direct demonstration that subliminal advertising can work comes from a study done by psychologists Johan Karremans. Wolfgang Stroebe. and laspar Claus. They argued that subliminal advertising inuences brand preference only when someone is motivated to buy in the first place. In their experiment. people tracked strings of letters on a computer screen. Unbeknounst to the partiCipants. subliminal messages were being flashed every so often. Half ofthe participants were exposed to the subliminal message "Lipton Ice.\" and half were exposed to a control word. Later. in a supposedly unrelated second study. participants were asked both how thirsty they were and whether they preferred Lipton or a competing brand The results: When subjects were not thirsty. the two groups showed the same preference for Lipton. But thirsty participants showed a different pattern: Those exposed to the Lipton subliminal message showed a strong preference for Lipton; those in the control group did not. The authors\" explanation: Motivation plus subliminal prime equals increased preference for the primed brand. Taken together. these studies and many others show conclusively that we can be alfected by messages presented outside of awareness. Score one for Vicary But it is a long way from saying this can be done to showing that it is done In fact. as stated earlier. no one has ever shown that an ad campaign has used subliminal stimuli. And no research backs up Key's claims about \"embeds"= in print ads. But can we be sure that no advertiser ever used subliminal advertising? Proving that something has never happened is pretty difficult [can you really \"prove" that Aunt Lois wasn't abducted by aliens returning home from school back in 1957'). But the risks an advertiser would court by using a subliminal message far outweigh the Likely rewards. \\''iat would consumers think ot'a company that was caught using sublimmal ads? What would the legal repercussions be? Moreover. why would a company choose subliminal advertising when the nonsubliniinal type can work so well? People seem both repelled and attracted by the thought that they can be muenced below the threshold of awareness It seems to imply a hidden power and dovetails nicely with a universal interest in the idea that not every1hing is what it seems. interest in the phenomenon of subliminal advertising won't be going away soon. especially now that we know it CAN wort-r. Questions 1. What are the ethical concerns that subliminal advertising would create? Who are the stakeholders (people or groups that would be affected by this practice)? 2. How does subliminal advertising relate to the free-market principle of complete information we discussed earlier\