In 1957, James Vicary famously flashed subliminal advertising messages on a movie screen and claimed it boosted sales of refreshments. Vicary later admitted that he had lied about the results. Since then, the effectiveness of subliminals has been the subject of some debate. A new study from University College London suggests that negative subliminal messages can work, at least in a laboratory setting. The researchers flashed a series of positive (cheerful, etc.), negative (agony, etc.), or neutral (box, etc.) words on a screen but not long enough for them to be consciously read. When the subjects were asked if the words they couldn't consciously have read were positive, negative, or neutral, they accurately categorized 66% of the negative word. From the BBC News:
The researchers found that the participants answered most accurately when responding to negative words, even when they believed they were merely guessing the answer. They were able to accurately categorise 66% of the negative words compared to 50% of the positive ones."Negative subliminal messages work"
Subliminal advertising is not permitted on television in the UK.
But Professor (Nillie) Lavie said her work could be applicable to marketing campaigns: "Negative words may have more of a rapid impact - "Kill Your Speed" should work better than "Slow Down".Kill your boredom by reading Boing Boing!!!
"More controversially, a competitor's negative qualities may work on a subconscious level much more effectively than shouting about your own selling points."
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"Kill your boredom by reading boing boing"
Thank you compulsive highlighting habit.
Interesting! I´ve heard that the brain don´t "hear" not, if you say "I´ll not be sick" - you´ll be sick. To stay healthy you´d say "I´ll keep healthy". So what I just read means that you need strong negative words to get attantion but not not´s!
Nice hidden comment:
"Kill your boredom by reading Boing Boing!!!"
If not for my obsessive selecting of text with the mouse as I read things, I would have never found it :)
Blipverts can be harmful to inactive people. But only Channel 23 has them.
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"More controversially, a competitor's negative qualities may work on a subconscious level much more effectively than shouting about your own selling points."
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And this is the reason why politics gets so dirty. It's not so much *saying* your opponents is something horrible, as it is *alluding* to it, and letting the brain make the final jump itself.
BTW, for the positive ones to work, you would have to use essentially two words, "god" and "love". They are the only two words (off the top of my head), that have a near-universal strong positive emotional response.
"Flower" doesn't balance out "Murder".
And "Cheerful" doesn't balance out "Despair".
I'd have to see the word choice a bit more before I buy it, but I do know there are a lot more terms that are strongly negative than there are strongly positive (all of which tend to coalesce into the two mentioned).
Sounds like most political ads I've ever seen ever.
It seems like the data can be interpreted differently.
Isn't it possible that people just guessed negative words more often (which would mean they would end up being correct more often when "negative" was the correct answer) for some reason _other_ than having actually recognized the words? It seems plausible that people are, for reasons about which we are free to speculate in a tangential discussion, simply more prone to guessing "negative" when given those three options.
Wah #5: BTW, for the positive ones to work, you would have to use essentially two words, "god" and "love".
Hmm. So, atheists would be immune from half the positive subliminal messages? Nice.
There's been so much garbage in this field that it tends to discredit the whole thing. I actually read Subliminal Seduction by Wilson Bryan Key, and it was often hysterical (in both senses). The example I remember best was a Playboy centerfold from the '70s. If you held it up in front of a light (doesn't everybody look at Playboy that way?), you could kinda-sorta see the letters S-E-X in the folds of the bedsheets down in the lower-right corner. That's how Playboy was turning us on, don't you see? It didn't have anything to do with the beautiful naked blonde taking up most of the page, it was those hard-to-see letters in the corner!
That said, I think there might be some sort of faint effect, as this experiment seems to demonstrate, but it seems fairly worthless to me, for advertising or whatever. The same effort put into the words and images in the visible, upfront message would probably have a bigger payoff.
Has the study itself actually been published yet? I'm wondering about the methodology here.
I'm skeptical, as well. But if negative words truly are absorbed more quickly, that would make more sense than the reverse. After all, we are animals who had to evolve among predators, and being highly aware of negative stimuli can influence our chances of survival.
Let’s face it, we’re subliminal creatures; delivering and receiving subtle messages between our spouses, friends, business associates and even strangers. Depending on how closely you’re paying attention to what’s going on around you determines how many subliminal messages you pick up. Think about your last “big meeting” at the office. Body language, verbal tone, certain words… they are used, consciously or unconsciously, to influence. The interesting thing about the study you shared is the higher recall for negative messages and more specifically, harsher words. When someone in that “big meeting” dropped an F-bomb to make a point, that’s probably the one you remember most.