Abstract
On September 12, 1957, audiences at a Fort Lee, New Jersey, drive-in movie theater became the unwitting subjects of a psychological experiment. James Vicary, a forty-two-year-old marketing consultant, convinced the theater owners to flicker images across the screen at one-three-thousandth of a second, faster than the eye could see. As patrons watched Kim Novak and William Holden cavorting in the film Picnic, the words “eat popcorn” and “drink Coca Cola” infiltrated their subconscious. When Vicary revealed the test to the public a few days later, he bragged that his hidden messages had induced a surge in popcorn and soft drink sales of 50 and 18 percent, respectively. In little more than a year, Vicary predicted, cinemas across the nation would be using this new, unorthodox selling technique.1 Subliminal advertising, a term not found in the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature before 1957, rivaled reports of UFOs and communist spies for the top story of the year.2
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Notes
Timothy E. Moore, “Subliminal Advertising: What You See is What You Get,” Journal of Marketing 46, no. 2 (1982): 38–47.
Norman Cousins, “Smudging the Subconscious,” Saturday Review 40 (1957): 1.
Israel Goldiamond, “The Hysteria over Subliminal Advertising as Misunderstanding of Science,” American Psychologist 14, no. 9 (1959): 598–99.
Ralph Norman Haber, “Public Attitudes Regarding Subliminal Advertising,” The Public Opinion Quarterly 23, no. 2 (1959): 291–93.
Moore, “Subliminal Advertising: What You See is What You Get”; also James V. McConnell, Richard L. Cutler, and Elton B. McNeil “Subliminal Stimulation: An Overview,” The American Psychologist 13, no. 3 (1958): 229–42.
S. Bach and G. S. Klein, “Conscious Effects of Prolonged Subliminal Exposures of Words,” American Psychologist 12 (July 1957): 397.
For more, see Richard Lazarus and Robert McCleary, “Autonomic Discrimination without Awareness: A Study in Subception,” Psychological Review 58 (March 1951): 113–22.
Advertising Research Foundation, The Application of Subliminal Perception in Advertising (New York, 1958).
Kathryn T. Theus, “Subliminal Advertising and the Psychology of Processing Unconscious Stimuli: A Review of Research,” Psychology & Marketing 11, no. 3 (1994): 271–90.
For a recent study, see Rajeev Kohi, “An Experimental Investigation into the Effect of Subliminal Stimulation on Consumer Behavior” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1985). He, too, finds that the most effective examples are closest to consciousness and involve behaviors that subjects are already predisposed to.
See also Bertrand Klass, “The Ghost of Subliminal Advertising,” Journal of Marketing 23, no. 2 (1958): 149–51.
Anthony R. Pratkanis “The Cargo-Cult Science of Subliminal Persuasion,” Skeptical Inquirer 16, no. 3 (1992): 260–72;
Stuart Rogers, “How a Publicity Blitz Created the Myth of Subliminal Advertising,” Public Relations Quarterly 37, no. 4 (1992–93): 12; F. Danzig, “Subliminal Advertising—Today It’s Just Historical Flashback for Researcher Vicary,” Advertising Age, September 17, 1962.
Sheri J. Broyles, “Subliminal Advertising and the Perpetual Popularity of Playing to People’s Paranoia,” Journal of Consumer Affairs 40, vol. 2 (2006): 392–406;
Laura Brannon and Timothy Brock, “The Subliminal Persuasion Controversy: Reality, Enduring Fable, and Polonius’s Weasel,” in Persuasion: Psychological Insights and Perspectives, ed. S. Shavitt and T. C. Brock (Boston, MA, 1994), 279–93.
Wilson Brian Key, The Age of Manipulation: The Con in Confidence, the Sin in Sincere (New York, 1989), xviii. For further discussion, see Brannon and Brock, “The Subliminal Persuasion Controversy.”
Eric J. Zanot, J. David Pincus, and E. Joseph Lamp, “Public Perceptions of Subliminal Advertising, Journal of Advertising 12, no. 1 (1983): 39–45.
Charles Trappey “A Meta-Analysis of Consumer Choice and Subliminal Advertising,” Psychology and Marketing 13, no. 5 (1996): 517.
Lizbeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York, 2003). See also Lawrence Glickman, “The Consumer and the Citizen in Personal Influence,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 608, no. 1 (2006): 204–13; and, in the same volume, Michael Schudson, “The Troubling Equivalence of Citizen and Consumer,” 194–206.
Jean M. Converse, Survey Research in the United States: Roots and Emergence, 1890–1960 (Berkeley, CA, 1987), 87–127.
On the history of market research before World War II, see Coleman Harwell Wells, “Remapping America: Market Research and American Society, 1900–1940,” (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 1999);
and Albert Blankenship, Consumer and Opinion Research (New York, 1943).
Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity (Berkeley, CA, 1985), 11–13;
Peggy J. Kreshel, “John B. Watson at J. Walter Thompson: The Legitimation of “Science” in Advertising,” Journal of Advertising 19, no. 2 (1990): 49–60;
Marvin Olasky, “Bringing ‘Order Out of Chaos’: Edward Bernays and the Salvation of Society through Public Relations,” Journalism History 12, no. 1 (1985): 17–21;
Kerry W. Buckley, Mechanical Man: John Broadus Watson and the Beginnings of Behaviorism (New York, 1989).
Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (New York, 1991), 229–37.
David Haney, The Americanization of Social Science: Intellectuals and Public Responsibility in the Postwar United States (Philadelphia, PA, 2008), 68–77;
Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York, 1991), 356–59.
Converse, Survey Research, 162–207, 367–73; Seymour Sudman and Norman M. Bradburn, “The Organizational Growth of Public Opinion Research in the United States,” Public Opinion Quarterly 51, no. 2, supplement (1987): S67–S78.
Haney, Americanization of Social Science, 97–102. See also Edward Purcell, The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value (Lexington, KY, 1973).
Daniel Horowitz, The Morality of Spending: Attitudes Toward the Consumer Society in America, 1875–1940 (Baltimore, MD, 1985);
Michael Schudson, Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society (New York, 1984).
Allen H. Barton, “Paul Lazarsfeld and Applied Social Research: Invention of the University Applied Social Research Institute,” Social Science History 3, no. 3/4 (1979): 4–44.
For more on Lazarsfeld’s connection to market and media research, see Gerben Bakker, “Building Knowledge about the Consumer: The Emergence of Market Research in the Motion Picture Industry,” Business History 45, no. 1 (2003): 101–30.
Elihu Katz and Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications (Glencoe, IL, 1955), 7; Glickman, “The Consumer and the Citizen in Personal Influence”; Schudson, “The Troubling Equivalence of Citizen and Consumer.”
Katz and Lazarsfeld, Personal Influence, 16. For a discussion of the book, see Jefferson Pooley, “Fifteen Pages that Shook the Field: Personal Influence, Edward Shils and the Remembered History of Mass Communication,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 608, no. 1 (2006): 130–56.
Mayo himself recognized the utility of his group methods for advertising. See Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, Baker Library, Mayo Collection, box 3a, folder 9, Advertising History Foundation, proposal, 1936 (Proposal of July 8, 1936). On the Hawthorne experiments, see Richard Gillespie, Manufacturing Knowledge: A History of the Hawthorne Experiments (New York, 1991). The attention to primary groups went back to Charles Cooley in the early twentieth century, as Lazarsfeld acknowledged, and was also present in the work of Lloyd Warner (Yankee City, 1937), who was influenced by Mayo. But it was deemphasized in the 1920s in the work of social scientists studying mass society, only to be reemployed by Mayo in the 1930s. See Ross, Origins of American Social Science, 243–51. Lazarsfeld noted that works such as The American Solider (1949), studies of the World War II bond drives, and his own book on political campaigns, The People’s Choice (1944), showed that mass media alone could not explain behavior, attitudes, and values. Edward Shils was especially important in drawing out the implications of Lazarsfeld’s work for repudiating “the mistaken European view of impersonal isolation” in modern America and insisting on “the persistence of custom and primary ties in the modern world.” See Pooley, “Fifteen Pages that Shook the Field,” 132–33.
For an overview of post-World War II market research and the place of social science, see Cohen, Consumer’s Republic, 292–344; Michael M. Sokal, “The Origins of the Psychological Corporation,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 17, no. 1 (1981): 54–67.
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Lipartito, K. (2012). Subliminal Seduction: The Politics of Consumer Research in Post-World War II America. In: Berghoff, H., Scranton, P., Spiekermann, U. (eds) The Rise of Marketing and Market Research. Worlds of Consumption. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137071286_10
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