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Have you ever seen the movie Fight Club? It stars the neurotic Edward Norton and his sexy counter part Brad Pitt. Pitt plays a character who boasts that while he worked as a projectionist he would secretly splice frames of pornography into movies. Why? He thought it was funny to leave the movie goers with a feeling of unease for reasons they couldn’t pin down. Nothing like a little male genitalia to disrupt your subconscious. (And by little I mean above average, industry standard size.)

If you’re familiar with popular psychology you may be familiar with a similar, more tame story about subliminal messaging and movie patrons. In 1957 a marketing consultant names James Vicary decided to conduct a study to see whether or not the audience could be influenced by text based subliminal messages. Over a 6 week period he ran his study on 45,000 unsuspecting cinema lovers. While the audience watched the movie Picnic, two messages were displayed faster than the human eye can detect. According to the study they “flashed on the screen for 3/1000s of a second and were displayed once every 5 seconds”.

Vicary compared the sales of popcorn and Coca Cola during his 6 week study to those of the 6 weeks beforehand, to see if a negotiable difference existed. His findings were substantial. Coca Cola sales rose by 18%, while popcorn sales rocketed to 57%. Public hysteria ensued. As it turns out it was all for naught because in 1962 Vicary admitted that not only were his findings false but the whole experiment was a hoax, too. What a guy. 

Since then there have been numerous studies that have tried and failed to replicate his findings. What is of interest is the research that has developed because of this. It’s been determined that subliminal messaging “can influence mood and can create a feeling of familiarity with a product that has not been seen before”. This is known as priming. Priming is “a psychological phenomenon in which subtle clues in the environment (pictures, text, sounds, etc.) influences subconsciously how one things, feels, and acts”. Advertisers use this psychology to their benefit and can manipulate and therefore more readily predict how a person will react when exposed to certain stimuli. 

That being said, priming is not wildly dangerous like so many once believed. It will not cause you to buy things impulsively against your wishes. For priming to be truly successful the candidate has to be in a high need state for the marketed product.