Subliminal Advertising Research Paper

1. Introduction

Subliminal messages have become a common method for the advertising realms in order to increase sales or affect consumers’ behaviors. Since the 1900s, the perception of subliminal perception has been a disputable subject matter. A specific study going back to the 1950s, James Vicary who was responsible for incorporating a subliminal message in an ad “Drink Coke, Eat Popcorn.” (Russel, Rowe, & Smouse, 1991)

A subliminal message is constructed in a way to affect a viewers mind or psychological behavior. Edward L. Bernays, author of ‘Propaganda’ (1928) said, “Human desires are the steam which makes the social machine work. Only by understanding them can the propagandist control that vast, loose-jointed mechanism which is modern

This influenced the research paper to look further into this subject. This paper is going to investigate the claims and counterclaims regarding subliminal advertising; examining what power, if any, remains to the conception that the human subconscious can be unintentionally manipulated; if sexual subliminal messages determine individuals’ choices when being interactive with any form of advertisements, and conclusively to suggest the kinds of methods which may be successful, and the guidelines for further research in the

(Scripture, 1907) The basic principles of subliminal messages were outlined in the manuscript. But before Packard and Key, other psychologists had been examining the subconscious as far back as Freud, attempting to document stimulation of the subconscious, since the late eighteen hundreds. In 1931, Joseph Bressler referred to studies by J. McK. Cattell and G. S. Fullerton in 1892, Knight Dunlap in 1900, and E. B. Titchener and W. H. Pyle in 1907, on subliminal visual stimulation.

A psychologist named Knight Dunlap demonstrated an optical illusion containing of two lines of equivalent widths, which contained two arrows on both ends in order to create an illusion of different lengths. There was enough reaction to the subjects of the subliminal stimuli that caused an effect from those substances, which identified only
the visible line. Dunlap claimed that the shadow influenced the subjects subliminally in their resolution of the lengths of the lines. The optical flash was only the start of visual subliminal messages. Subsequently Bressler tried to perform an alternative on Dunlap 's experiment using colors of different shades of darkness, and discovered that the differences, which slightly increased in direct proportion to the increase in darkness of the paper