Objectives
• To study subliminal advertising using secondary resources.
• To study live examples of subliminal advertising and understand the implications of it.
Literature Review
The Concept
The term “subliminal” is derived from the construct of a “limen of consciousness”, a threshold or line separating conscious from unconscious. The concept dates back to the literal beginning of psychology as an empirical science separate from philosophy in the seminal writings of Johan Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841). Herbart argued that ideas (i.e., both perceptions and thoughts) differed from one another in strength, and inhibit or suppress one another in a dynamical fashion, competing with one another to achieve enough strength to rise above the “limen of consciousness” and, hence, be consciously experienced.
Pratkanis and Greenwald identify four types of subliminal stimuli: (1) sub threshold stimuli, which are presented at energy levels that are too weak to be detected by the audience (e.g., flashing the words “Eat popcorn” onto a screen so quickly that the audience is not aware of them), (2) masked stimuli, which are hidden from the audience by the presentation of some other, overriding stimuli (e.g., briefly presenting the stimulus immediately followed by a bright flash of light), (3) unattended stimuli, which are presented in such a way that the embedded figure is unlikely to be segregated from its figural context (e.g., hiding the figure of a naked body in the curves and lines of a picture of an ice cube), (4) figurally transformed stimuli, which are words or pictures blurred or distorted to the point that they are unrecognizable (e.g., commands recorded backward and inserted into popular music). (Pratkanis, A. R. ( ...