Word about the possible power of subliminal stimuli spread like wildfire, with a survey conducted just nine months after Vicary’s press conference revealing that more than 40 percent of respondents had heard about the story. The resulting hullabaloo caught the attention of Melvin DeFleur, an expert in communication studies from Indiana University. DeFleur had gained his doctorate for CIA-FUNDED research examining how information about food and shelter could be communicated effectively to the public in the event of a nuclear war.
2
DeFleur had been especially interested in the effectiveness of two low-tech methods of dissemination—word of mouth and the bombarding of towns with thousands of leaflets.
To avoid widespread panic, DeFleur and his colleagues often disguised the real reason for their work. In one part of the project, researchers visited a fifth of homes in an isolated town in Washington State posing as marketers for the Gold Shield Coffee Company. They told people that the company had developed a new slogan (“Gold Shield Coffee—Good as Gold”), and that three days later they would interview all the inhabitants in the town and give a pound of coffee to everyone who could name the slogan. In addition to this face-to-face attempt to create a caffeine-related buzz, the U.S. Air Force was also ordered to bombard the town with 30,000 leaflets describing the scheme. When the investigators arrived three days later, they discovered that 84 percent of inhabitants were able to tell them accurately that Gold Shield Coffee was as good as gold. In their resulting report, the researchers noted that this figure may represent an unrealistically high level of dissemination because the price of coffee had risen dramatically just before the study began, and the public might have been highly motivated to discover the slogan.
DeFleur was curious about James Vicary’s claims concerning subliminal perception, and he teamed up with his colleague Robert Petranoff to investigate.
3
The two decided to conduct a realistic test by presenting hidden messages on national television. They knew that they had to be quick. The National Association of Broadcasters had already recommended that subliminal stimuli were not to be used on the media, and it seemed likely that a full ban was on its way. DeFleur and Petranoff carried out two experiments on the television station WTTV Channel 4, in Indianapolis.
The first part of the study was designed to determine whether hidden messages could affect the public’s viewing habits. As part of its normal nightly programming, WTTV Channel 4 broadcast a two-hour feature film, followed by a news program hosted by a well-known presenter named Frank Edwards. The experimenters obtained permission to superimpose the subliminal message “Watch Frank Edwards” throughout the entire two-hour film in the hope that it would persuade more people to tune into the Edwards show.
A second aspect of the experiment examined the possibility that subliminal stimuli might alter people’s buying behavior. John Fig, Inc., a wholesale bacon distributor in Indiana, allowed the experimenters to flash the subliminal message “Buy Bacon” during its television commercials, and then track the resulting effect on sales across the region.
Throughout July 1958, people watching WTTV Channel 4 were bombarded with hidden messages that told them to watch Frank Edwards and to buy bacon. Before the experiment, an average of 4.6 percent of the public had been tuning into Frank Edwards. After being exposed to two hours of continual subliminal messages, that figure fell to just 3 percent. The effect of the subliminal messages on buying behavior was just as unimpressive. Before the experiment, John Fig, Inc., sold an average of 6,143 units of bacon per week to the good folk of Indiana. By the end of the study, the figure had shown a modest increase to 6,204 units per week. In short, the subliminal stimulation had had almost no effect on bacon sales and, if anything, had persuaded a considerable number of people to avoid Frank Edwards. The effects of the subliminal onslaught had been less than remarkable.
DeFleur and Petranoff concluded that the public could sleep easily at night, safe in the knowledge that they were not having their thoughts and behavior secretly manipulated by subliminal stimuli. Their conclusions were bolstered by another study carried out just a few months before theirs. In February 1958, the Canadian Broadcasting Company briefly presented the phrase “Phone Now” more than 350 times during a popular Sunday night program called
Close-Up,
and they asked viewers to write in if they noticed any strange changes in their behavior. CBC saw no noticeable increase in telephone usage during, or after, the program. The station did, however, receive hundreds of letters from viewers describing how they had experienced an unaccountable urge to drink beer, visit the bathroom, or take the dog for a walk. Despite the impressive lack of evidence suggesting that televised subliminal stimuli had any effect on viewers, in June 1958 the National Association of Broadcasters responded to public and political pressure by banning the use of these messages on American networks.
So why the discrepancy between the increase in sales of popcorn and Coke claimed by James Vicary, and the lack of bacon buying reported by DeFleur and Petranoff? The mystery was finally resolved in 1962, when Vicary was interviewed in the magazine
Advertising Age.
He explained how his story about subliminal stimuli and buying behavior had been leaked to the media far too early. In fact, he had collected only the minimum amount of data needed to file a patent, and he admitted that his investigations were much too small to be meaningful. The entire public and political debate had been based on fiction, not on fact. Toward the end of his interview, Vicary added: “All I accomplished, I guess, was to put a new word into common usage. . . . I try not to think about it anymore.” Vicary did far more than simply encourage people to use the word “subliminal.” His fictitious study has become the stuff of urban legend, and is still referred to by those who believe that buying behavior can be influenced by subliminal messages.
The lack of evidence to support a link between televised subliminal messages and behavior has not stopped present-day politicians from worrying about the possible effect of subtle signals on voters. During the 2000 U.S. presidential elections, the Republicans produced a television advertisement criticizing the Democrats’ policy toward prescription drugs for the elderly. As part of the advertisement, various words slowly moved from the foreground to the background. As the word “bureaucrats” came into view, one frame of the ad contained just the last four letters of the word, spelling “rats.” The Democrats perceived this as an attempt to sway the electorate via subliminal perception and asked the Federal Communications Commission to investigate the matter. The Republicans dismissed the appearance of the “rats” word as coincidence, and argued that the advertisement was about health care and not rodents.
James Vicary is not the only person to claim that subliminal stimuli can exert a powerful effect on behavior. Others have written best-selling books claiming that advertisers regularly implant sexually arousing images in photographs to help boost sales. Alleged examples include women with bare breasts embedded in ice cubes, a man with an erection pictured on cigarette packs, and the word “sex” embedded several times on each side of one of the world’s best-selling biscuits. In addition, several companies have marketed subliminal audiotapes containing hidden messages that claim to produce all sorts of desirable effects, including increased self-esteem, sexual prowess, and intelligence. This is not small business. In 1990, it was estimated that sales of subliminal audiotapes exceeded $50 million annually in the United States alone.
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Most of these claims have not been subjected to any form of scientific testing, and the few studies that have been carried out on the topic have failed to support the efficacy of such hidden messages.
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In one study, overweight people listened to subliminal audiotapes designed to help them drop a size. They lost no more weight than a control group not listening to any tapes.
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In another experiment, police officers spent more than twenty weeks listening to tapes designed to improve their marksmanship.
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The results revealed that the group ended up with the same shooting abilities as their non-subliminally stimulated colleagues.
So, does this mean that our thinking and behavior isn’t influenced by small, subtle signals? In fact, a large amount of research suggests that many aspects of our everyday behavior are affected by factors outside our awareness. These factors are not to be found being briefly flashed up on movie and television screens; instead, they are right in front of our noses and can exert a considerable influence on the way we think and behave. Like something as simple as your name.
MR. BUN THE BAKER
In 1971, two psychologists, Barbara Buchanan and James Bruning, asked a group of people to rate how much they liked a thousand or so first names.
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Strong stereotypes emerged, the vast majority of people giving the thumbs-up to the likes of
Michael, James,
and
Wendy,
but showing an equally strong dislike for
Alfreda, Percival,
and
Isidore.
It would be nice to think that these emotional reactions don’t have a significant effect on people’s lives. Nice, but wrong.
In the late 1960s, the American researchers Arthur Hartman, Robert Nicolay, and Jesse Hurley examined whether people with unusual names were more psychologically disturbed than their normally named peers.
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They examined more than 10,000 psychiatric court records, and identified eighty-eight people whose first names were highly unusual, such as Oder, Lethal, and Vere. They then looked through the same set of records and put together a control group of eighty-eight normally named people who were matched on gender, age, and place of birth. Those with unusual names were significantly more likely than the control group to be diagnosed as psychotic. As the researchers note in their paper, “A child’s name . . . is generally a settled affair when his first breath is drawn, and his future personality must then grow within its shadow.”
Other studies have also documented the downside of having a name that stands out from the crowd. Research has shown that teachers award higher essay grades to children with likeable names,
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that college students with undesirable names experience high levels of social isolation, and that people whose surnames happen to have negative connotations (such as “Short,” “Little,” or “Bent”) are especially likely to suffer feelings of inferiority.
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The psychiatrist William Murphy has examined several case histories illustrating this final point. In one instance, a patient admitted to wearing an athletic supporter to bed when he was a boy to prevent his penis becoming erect. The supporter failed to have the desired effect, and instead caused the boy’s penis to bend downward. Unfortunately, the patient’s last name was Bent, and this, coupled with the fact that his nickname was “Dinkey,” constantly reminded him of the sexual problems that he had experienced as a boy. This, in turn, made him feel anxious about sex, resulting in psychosexual impotence and reinforcing his feelings of inadequacy.
Nicholas Christenfeld, David Phillips, and Laura Glynn from the University of California, San Diego, uncovered evidence in 1999 suggesting that even a person’s initials may become an issue of life or death.
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The team used an electronic dictionary to generate every three-letter word in the English language. They then worked their way through the list, identifying words that were especially positive (such as “ace,” “hug,” and “joy”) and those that had very negative connotations (“pig,” “bum,” and “die”). Using a computerized database of California death certificates, they examined the ages at which people with “positive” and “negative” sets of initials passed away. Controlling for factors such as race, year of death, and socioeconomic status, the researchers discovered that men with positive initials lived around four and a half years longer than average, whereas those with negative initials died about three years earlier than average. Women with positive initials lived an extra three years, although there was no detrimental effect for those with negative initials. When discussing the possible mechanisms behind the effect, the authors noted that people with negative initials “may not think well of themselves, and may have to endure teasing and other negative reactions from those around them.” This idea was supported by the fact that those with negative initials were especially likely to die from causes with psychological underpinnings, such as suicides and accidents.
But it is not all doom and gloom for the unusually named and negatively initialed. Another team of researchers have questioned the findings of the Christenfeld study. In a paper titled “Monogrammic Determinism?” Stilian Morrison and Gary Smith from Pomona College in California criticized the statistical methods used in the original experiment and failed to replicate the findings using what they consider to be more sophisticated analyses.
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Richard Zweigenhaft, a psychologist from Guilford College in North Carolina, has argued that there are several potential benefits associated with having an unusual name.
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He notes that one of the most frequently voiced complaints by those with common names is that there are too many other people with the same name. The same point was well made by Samuel Goldwyn who, upon hearing that a friend had named his son John, quipped, “Why did you name him John? Every Tom, Dick, and Harry is named John.” Zweigenhaft also notes that unusual names are more memorable and cites several instances in which the fame enjoyed by well-known sports people may have been due, at least in part, to their unusual names. As one
New York Post
sportswriter noted when discussing the Oakland Athletics’ pitcher Vida Blue, “America knew it instantly. Vida Blue! Vida Blue tripped off the tongue like Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb and Lefty Grove.”