Roughly 51 percent said they felt motivated to do something, though mostly it was to get up from the couch to eat.
Chevrolet promoted its new cars with a skit featuring Pat Boone and Dinah Shore singing a jingle with this verse: Hey, have you heard the crazy new way To send a message today? Yet broadcasters and adver- tisers turned and ran from what might seem the ultimate selling technology.
But perhaps more important was doubt that it actually worked. The Science of the Subliminal Subliminal advertising gained credibility in part because it was linked to an older and much sounder scientific literature on subliminal perception. As early as , studies had shown it possible to elicit measurable responses from people exposed to stimuli below the threshold of conscious percep- tion. The next day he asked them about their dreams.
Some reported details of the landscape slides, lead- ing Poetzl to conclude that subliminal impressions had been recorded by their unconscious minds. But in the s and s, research shifted from subliminal perception to sub- liminal influence. In such experiments, subjects tended to ascribe the suggested emotion to the image.
In fact, evidence pointed in the opposite direction. People were influenced subconsciously in the same manner and direction that they were consciously. Subjects responded to subliminal mes- sages more strongly when they were already disposed in the direction of the message.
Indeed, it seemed likely that measured effects were not truly subliminal in some cases. In short, at the very moment when subliminal sales gurus like James Vicary were making their pitch to advertisers, research was showing that there was nothing special or particularly influential about subliminal perception.
The BBC received postcards, 20 correct, partially correct, though a London newspaper had revealed the contents of the message the day after the broadcast, invalidating the results.
A more exacting repeat of the experiment produced a disappointing outcome of 2 correct and 15 partially correct responses.
Laboratory experiments in care- fully controlled environments fared even worse. There had been no increase in popcorn or drink sales that night in Fort Lee. It was all a hoax to revive the sagging fortunes of his research firm. His admission was widely reported in the trade press. But it does not. Subliminal had evolved into a substitute for metonymy and metaphor. Key focused not just on television and the movies but on virtually all advertisements, even printed ones, where it would seem impossible for a communication to be subliminal.
It was, Key pro- claimed, a vast conspiracy of big corporations and big government to control minds. The substitution of cultural fantasies for realities on a massive, worldwide scale threatens everyone in this precarious period of human evolution. Nonetheless, his books revived interest in the subject. In , police in an unnamed Midwestern city tried to apprehend a murderer by placing subliminal descriptions of the crime into frames of television news footage.
A department store in Toronto broadcast subliminal messages to deter shop- lifters. The young rock fans had been listening to their songs while consuming quantities of beer and marijuana in the hours leading up to their deaths. At the trial, University of Michigan psychologist Howard Shervin concluded that subliminal messages could have contributed to the suicides. It is not hard to see that periodic outbursts of fear over things sublimi- nal can be tied to moments of political and cultural anxiety.
James Vicary appeared on the scene with the nation suffering Cold War fevers over brain- washing, communist infiltration, UFOs, and nuclear war. The s and early s were marked by mistrust of business and government following the Vietnam War and Watergate.
The back-masking controversy followed in the wake of a deep cultural division between the right and left on such mat- ters as teenage sexuality, drug use, and the virtues of the free market.
Still, across the decades, in different contexts, one consistent refrain sounded in all the subliminal controversies—the threat to freedom in an American society that placed premier value on individual choice. As recent historical scholarship has argued, the politics of postwar America centered on citizen consumers. Freedom had become linked to the ability of individu- als to express their sovereign wants in the marketplace and in the voting booth.
In this context, subliminal persuasion was indeed a technology of unfreedom, for it could threaten individual choice in both places. Radical ideologies, they argued, yielded neither material wealth nor personal freedom. A free American dedicated to individualism, however, enjoyed both consumer abundance and democratic institutions.
Social science acted in service to American society by track- ing and measuring individual attitudes and beliefs through opinion polls, focus groups, community studies, psychological tests, statistics, and surveys. It was in this context that subliminal advertising appeared so threatening. It put the tools of social science and psychology to the tasks of manipulating and controlling individuals. The subliminal scare was part of a long debate about the persuasive power of the new science of advertising and the emerging technologies of mass media.
This measuring of the public and its beliefs was taken up by advertisers starting around World War I. They used some of the first opinion polls and conducted statisti- cal analyses correlating buying habits with conditions of life. Newspapers, popular magazines, advertising agencies, manufacturers, and retailers par- ticipated in this initial wave of market research.
Pollsters offered expert advice to advertisers, pro- ducers, radio broadcasters, newspapers, and others seeking to understand what the public wanted. Armed with the tools of behav- ioral science, advertisers refined their techniques of persuasion and increased the accuracy of their predictions. The research on media and persuasion also addressed politics. Like the market, politics was seen as an arena of individual choice. In one case, citi- zens cast votes for the candidates they preferred, and in the other, consumers voted with dollars for the goods they desired.
Indeed, George Gallup and other pollsters moved into political polling only after they had developed their techniques in the study of consumers and markets.
But whether study- ing people as consumers or as voters, one had to account for the nonrational and emotional. Social scientists in the s thus highlighted the alienation of rootless individuals in mass society, the breakdown of community in the urban era. As consumers and as citizens, they feared, modern men and women would be subject to manipulative influences, the powers of which had been starkly revealed in the emotion-laden propaganda of World War I.
At the same time, social scientists believed that social control, properly exer- cised by experts, could tamp down dangerous emotions and replace the lost community life and social harmony of the past with expertise drawn from the sciences of society.
In the s, social investigators had a chance to prove that they could benefit society when they served in the programs of the New Deal. The Department of the Treasury launched effective mass campaigns to sell war bonds in a manner similar to the bond drives of World War I. This focus on persuasion reflected the memory of fascist and communist propaganda in the s and s. Mussolini and Hitler had successfully deployed radio broadcasts and propaganda films to foment nationalism and create cults of the leader.
From mass rallies in Nuremberg to bond drives across the United States, propaganda proved a powerful device for organizing and motivating large audiences.
Popular indictments of the weak-willed masses appeared in books such as The Authoritarian Personality Respected scholars Seymour Martin Lipset and Richard Hofstadter condemned working-class authoritarianism and populist paranoia, arguing that the population of the United States was hardly immune to mass media manipulation. A group of liberal American sociologists argued that people were more resistant to propaganda and less easily manipulated than com- monly thought.
The entire premise of behavioral psychology, which viewed individuals as empty vessels reacting to stimuli, came under scrutiny, as did assumptions of rootlessness and alienation under capitalism. The central figure in this rethinking was Paul Lazarsfeld. Born in Vienna in , Lazarsfeld had moved to America before the Anschluss, traveling the country on a Rockefeller grant and working for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration between and In Vienna, he had undertaken one of the first attempts to measure radio-listening audi- ences.
His participation in the classic community study Die Arbeitslosen von Marienthal had also introduced him to the devastation wrought on working-class culture by the Great Depression. His own works of social inquiry borrowed techniques from market research to investigate why workers chose the political alliances they did.
It was a question, Lazarsfeld admitted, asked with an eye toward developing more appealing promotional materials for the socialists in the same manner that advertisers tested cam- paigns for products. Eventually, Lazarsfeld moved his research shop to New York and secured an appointment at Columbia University, where he contin- ued for the rest of his career. Voting and buying could both be conceived of as short-term strategic decisions responding to innate prefer- ences and immediate environment.
A culmina- tion of decades of research on media and mind, it made a strikingly different case from the common wisdom on what influenced the public. Friends, neighbors, family, and trusted community lead- ers spread information and provided validation and credibility for messages, which were actively discussed and debated by citizens, not passively received. Respondents must be studied within the con- text of the group or groups to which they belong.
Rather, he uncovered at the Hawthorne plant in Chicago a hidden world of social order and meaning among the workers. Managers desiring to influ- ence worker performance had to operate through this shop-floor culture and attune their incentives to its norms and values. Lazarsfeld and Katz took this insight a step further, arguing—against the beliefs of their peers—that pri- mary groups still mattered in the mid-twentieth century.
They moved the discussion from the site of work and production to the home, community, and site of consumption. It argued against the position that industrial life was inherently alienating, consumption inevitably unfulfilling.
Consumption need not be empty or inauthentic if individuals had the ability to sort infor- mation and make their own choices.
Should individuals find their wants frustrated and desires unfulfilled, they might once again succumb to irrational appeals and radical ideologies. In line with other postwar liberals, Lazarsfeld believed that the methods of social research could prevent such an outcome through their wise application in managing social problems and curing social ills.
While the macroeconomy might be largely in the hands of govern- ment, business itself had direct, day-to-day contact with consumers and, therefore, the sites of sales and purchases. Adopting the new techniques for understanding communications and behavior, firms could claim to be doing their part in keeping up consumer demand with enticing appeals and cheery, optimistic sales campaigns that boosted consumer confidence. Seen this way, advertising and commercial messages took on positive roles in society.
McCoy in People might well get their information from groups and respond to opinion makers, but there was no reason a firm could not tap those outlets to enhance mass media persuasion, as well. Although he eschewed quantitative analysis, Dichter followed his former statistics teacher Lazarsfeld in regarding all social phenomena as amenable to the same research methods.
Once someone was thoroughly studied, it would be easy to figure out what they wanted. Motivational research sought to understand the hows and whys of consumption in the context of everyday American life—the super- market, the suburban household—where it acquired meaning.
Dichter, like Lazarsfeld, Dollard, and other postwar liberals, emphasized the healthy integration of individuals within their social roles, not the alienation and loneliness of one-dimensional men and women. Men read more advertisements after a big purchase like a car than before.
Psychological conflicts, uncertainty, and the chaos of ordinary life would lead people into the hands of demagogues who offered comfort- ing but dangerous political ideologies.
With Joseph McCarthy dominating the airwaves, it was not hard to see such dangers. Every little brick which is at the right place in this world, is a parcel of their feeling of security. Change the place of one brick, and they feel threatened. It was not just a matter of getting people to buy more, though Keynesian economic policy certainly required that. It was getting them to choose goods that produced psycho- logical as well as material satisfactions.
The economic need for confident consumers met the psychological need for satisfying consumption. Through the goods they purchased and the meanings they attached to those goods, people would actualize their highest potential.
The emphasis on persuasion thus required, indeed justified, closer sur- veillance of the consumer. Ignorance yielded poor messages that missed the deeper meanings of products. Radio, for example, permitted sellers to better predict the relationship between money spent on advertising campaigns and the resulting messages received by the public. Taking advantage of the relatively high diffusion of telephones in the United States, polling experts conducted audience surveys immediately following broadcasts.
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