Subliminal Suggestion
It sorta works.
60 years ago I remember a spate of news stories about subliminal suggestion being used in advertising: the scandal was labelled subliminal seduction.
The idea was to somehow poke a suggestion into your mind without you being aware of it. People thought it was cheating.
For instance, a movie theatre might flash something like "eat popcorn" on the screen so quickly that the audience didn't consciously perceive it but popcorn sales would rise.
A famous example was a vodka ad with a nude woman was hidden in the abstract forms in an ice cube.
The method actually works under certain very limited circumstances. It can be replicated in a lab. But it was found to be minimally effective in motivating people to buy popcorn
.
It seems to work when associating pretty women or famous people with various products - the evidence for that is quite easy to see. Advertising is an expensive game and techniques that aren't effective don't last long,
The phenomenon is coherent with Benjamin Libet's work on intentional acts. He found that he could detect an intention to act significantly before his subject was aware of it.
The news is supposedly objective but is full of subliminal messages. I admit that the media I read is mostly subliminal messaging with a smattering of facts. When you read a story about Trump (say) you get a lot of unstated impressions about his capabilities as well as a report about what he's doing.
One of the main subliminal channels into our brains these days is photographs. They sit there with the text influencing our thinking without us really paying much attention to them.
I've noticed this lately with Trump's re-election. Before the election all the pictures of him were of him howling nonsense at his rallies. His face was distorted into various grimaces and shouts.
Now, aside from the makeup he almost looks normal.
And I think that makeup is a very common form of subliminal suggestion. One can imagine the suggestion being something like: I'm a tanned and fit surfer - therefore what I say is true.
But, honest, I think the only person who is unaware of the impression the makeup gives is Trump.
<
Once I had a housemate who was an aesthetician. She was just a normal woman at home. Once I met her on the street one day while she was dressed for work. Visually she was pressing a whole bunch of buttons at once - my knees were almost shaking. But I kept it together - she was my housemate after all.
Subliminal suggestion is very common I think. We take in a lot of information from our environment without being aware of it. It has to be so. The amount of information the environment offers is too big for my awareness to encompass.
I can walk on a crowded sidewalk easily avoiding the other people and keeping to the sidewalk and not bumping into the buildings without really being conscious of all that stuff. At least I could before getting mindfulness training :-)
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.