subliminal persuasion with food advertising

In 1957, James Vicary, a market researcher from New Jersey, claimed that flashing messages encouraging popcorn eating and drinking Coca-Cola raised vendor sales. These findings highlight the necessity of taking personality into account in non-conscious persuasion research.Ĭan people’s choices be affected subliminally? Since the 1950s, there have been persistent myths about the efficacy of persuading others without their knowledge. Going beyond previous research showing that situational factors (e.g., thirst, fatigue…) can increase people’s sensitivity to subliminal advertisement, our results suggest that some dispositional factors could have the same potentiating effect.

However, this effect was twice as strong for participants high in sensation seeking and did not occur for participants low in sensation seeking. Results revealed that being exposed to Red Bull lead on average to small increases in participants’ preferences for the primed brand. Participants with different levels of sensation seeking were presented subliminally with the words Red Bull or Lde Ublr. This study assessed whether subliminal priming of a brand name of a drink can affect people’s choices for the primed brand, and whether this effect is moderated by personality traits. 3Department of Psychology: Cognition and Behavior, University of Liège, Liège, Belgium.2Department of Psychology, University of Texas, El Paso, TX, USA.1Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain.

Jones 2, Michel Hansenne 3 and Jordi Quoidbach 1

Subliminal persuasion with food advertising