When he was then asked to comment upon this, Vicary came clean and confessed that he had falsified the results from his original study. Under controlled conditions, there were absolutely no sales increases at all. Well, Vicary was asked to replicate his research in controlled conditions by Harcourt Assessment.
“So there is our evidence, why are you disputing subliminal messaging Adam?” It got lots of press, the media sensationalised it, it got discussed in psychology classes…. The ‘subliminal’ messages said “Drink Coca-Cola” and “Hungry? Eat Popcorn.” Vicary showed that during the films he had flashed the subliminal messages onto the screen, sales of Coca-Cola rose by an average of 18%, and sales of popcorn rose by 58%. This happened continually throughout the entire film being shown. For a period of six weeks, he flashed certain marketing messages onto the screen for less than 3 one hundredths of a second not enough time for people to consciously recognise or register the message. In the 1950s, a market research consultant called James Vicary installed a special projector inside a New Jersey cinema. What about the evidence to support the book’s findings though? This very successful book (sales-wise) led many to believe that the advertising industry were subliminally influencing the public. The Bible for advocates of subliminal advertising is a book written in 1974 by Wilson Bryan Key, Subliminal Seduction. With reference to today’s hypnosis blog entry title – The short answer is ‘no’ – there is no evidence to prove that they (subliminal messages or subliminal recordings) work. That would probably make for an unsatisfactory ending to the blog entry, so let me tell you why I write that. Despite us having a lot of brilliant evidence and research to draw upon to support our field (which would require actually reading books and journals), there are many who insist on perpetuating nonsense instead, nonsense that seems to be forged forever in everyday culture. One of the problems us hypnosis professionals face, is that popular perception often associates hypnosis with subliminal messaging and also, lots of hypnosis professionals and hypnotherapists sell ‘subliminal recordings’ or promote ideas of subliminal messaging.Īs with so much popular psychology, the field of hypnosis and hypnotherapy is rife with misinformation and falsehoods. We have discussed this subject in my hub with fellow professionals and I thought I’d relay some of our discussions and the evidence base here on my main hypnosis blog.
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