BigShinyThing

The idea of subliminal advertising has been with us since the 1950s, when market researcher James Vicary claimed to have influenced purchasing decisions by quickly flashing messages like drink Coca-Cola and eat popcorn on a movie screen. Subsequently Vicari admitted that he’d made the whole thing up, relegating the idea to the trash-heap of B-movie weird science.

However, as reported in New Scientist, new research indicates that, under certain conditions, sublim isn’t pure hokum after all:

The researchers asked 61 volunteers to perform a nonsense task - counting how many times a string of capital Bs was infiltrated by a lower-case b as they flashed up on a screen. The B strings appeared for 300 milliseconds each, and before them, a string of Xs always appeared, flanking a 23-millisecond subliminal message. For the experimental group, the message was “Lipton Ice”. Controls saw “Nipeic Tol”.

When the volunteers had completed this task, they were asked to choose between Lipton Ice and Spa Rood by clicking one of two keys - though they were told this was part of a separate study. They were also asked how likely they would be to order either of these drinks if they were sitting on a terrace, and to rate how thirsty they were. Volunteers who rated themselves as thirsty were more likely to choose Lipton Ice, but only if they had received the subliminal message.

So there you go — in the presence of biological need, subliminal messages can affect decisions. You*Will*Subscribe*To*BigShinyThing Blimey.