You may be interested to get hold of it and read it. Anyway the band got sued and there was a court investigation into the reality of subliminal messages in music. There was no voice – people who thought they could hear something had just been fooled by the electronic voice phenomena (i.e. There was a case in the eighties where a heavy metal band got sued for (it was alleged) putting subliminal suicidal messages in their songs. You asked specifically about subliminal messages in music. (On a side note i think there is probably a deep relation to the way hypnotism works here). Another thing is that research shows that if you tell someone about the expected effect of something subliminal the effect is cancelled out – people use conscious deliberation to monitor their behaviour and the automatic processes that are guiding them. You can see that not only are subliminal messages weak in size, they have to operate on something someone is already doing, or has the mental structures for doing already. So that is the weak (second point) and simple (first point) of the section title. In other words if you had told everyone “Mars Bars taste great, buy a mars bar when you leave the cinema!!” you would have got many more sales.
Secondly, the effect of subliminal messages (in this case mars bar sales) is usually less that the effect of superliminal messages. If you’d had shown a picture of a oysters, i don’t think anyone would have been at the popcorn-stand demanding to buy edible molluscs. The subliminal picture probably just made the idea of ‘Mars Bar’ come to mind for some people a couple of seconds earlier as they stood wondering about what selection to make. But two points: Firstly, these people were going to buy confectionary after the film anyway – you already had people ready to spend money on chocolate. (this experiment hasn’t been done, but it sounds plausible to me). This means that if you show a cinema audience of 1000 people, say, a 20 ms exposure of a Mars Bar and then measure how many more Mars Bars are sold in the foyer 10 minutes after the film you might find a 1% increase in Mar Bar Sales. pictures not seen consciously, words not heard consciously) the effects are always statistical and small. Even that may be an exaggeration.Īlthough you can measure the effects of subliminal stimuli (e.g. The title of the section in Mind Hacks should give you a good clue as to scientific opinion “Hack #82: Subliminal Messages Are Weak and Simple”.
I’m no expert on subliminal messages, but I did some research on it a few years ago, and again recently for the book.
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