Take a good look at the following republican (Bush vs. Gore) campaign video and pay close attention.
Did you see it? For those who didn’t, take another look and focus on the part where they talk about the democrats. See it now?
Well if you still didn’t I will tell you now, and even if you did, I’ll tell you anyway. The phenomenon that you just witnessed is called subliminal perception. If you take a look at the part where the text about the democrats appears, you can see the word RATS. The rest of the word democRATS pops up right after it but the damage might be done by then. The reason? Cues like this can shape peoples thoughts and encourage a certain behavior. Subliminal perception messages are usually not consciously noticed and therefore subliminal influencing is prohibited in most countries.
Another example: Marketing-researcher James Vicary conducted an experiment where subliminal text messages were repeatedly shown during a movie. The text messages were stated as “buy drinks” and “buy popcorn” and were shown for 0,03-seconds (which makes them invisible for the human eye). Vicary reported that the product sales significantly increased because of the subliminal messages.
Although it seems more than reasonable to ban subliminal advertising, I consider this measure unrealizable to some extent. Of course it shouldn’t be accepted when subliminal messages are applied in ways like those mentioned above, by showing texts that tell people what to do. Consider some of the following examples however:
Did somebody check Vicary's data ? Or in other words does it really work ?
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