Derren Brown is a British “mentalist” and entertainer. He has a number of fascinating videos over on You Tube, including this classic – quite simply, the most persuasive illustration of nonconscious processing I have ever seen. When you click on the video below, you may have to follow the link over to You Tube to watch it. Please do so, then come back to discuss. Be sure to watch to the end – it’s worth the investment.
Welcome back. What lessons can we draw from this clever experiment?
A really fascinating, and in several ways disturbing study crossed my desk a couple of weeks ago. Authored by Jennifer Harris, the legendary John Bargh, and Kelly Brownwell, the article is called “Priming Effects of Television Food Advertising on Eating Behavior”. It was published earlier this this year in Health Psychology. Abstract and online access are available here.
The study shows in undeniable terms that advertising is a powerful real-world prime for both children and adults. But if the purpose of advertising is to increase favorability toward and/or consumption of the product advertised, then this study also shows an unexpected effect. The advertising definitely primed eating, but the eating was not directed at the product advertised, or even at the category of the product advertised. People just ate more of whatever was put in front of them. So in a very real sense, the advertising failed in two critical ways: it did not influence behavior in the intended direction (toward the product advertised) and it did influence behavior is a troubling, unintended direction, by stimulating indiscriminate eating in general, unrelated to the product being advertised.
Posted
on October 12, 2009, 3:43 pm,
by Steve Genco,
under methods, preconscious.
Vaughan over at Mind Hacks published a post the other day about how we tend to synchronize our blinking when watching video stories. He strongly endorses a podcast on the subject, which I confess I haven’t listened to yet.
But I did have a chance to download the referenced study by Nakano et al. entitled “Synchronization of spontaneous eyeblinks while viewing video stories”. It is available online via Proceedings of the Royal Society, here.
Aside from the fact that the study uses videos of “Mr. Bean“, which makes it path-breaking on that account alone, it presents some really intriguing findings about when and why we blink and how blinking patterns provide important clues about what we find interesting and what we implicitly decide we can miss.
The title of this post refers to a December 2007 article in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by psychologist Ran R. Hassin and colleagues, “Subliminal exposure to national flags affects political thought and behavior”. The full article is available here.
Unlike most academic article titles, this one says it all, thank you. Hassin reports on three experiments performed in Israel in the weeks prior to Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 and the week before the Israeli general election in March 2006. The experiments asked people about their political opinions and voting intentions, but unbeknownst to the participants, half of them were “primed” with a subliminal image of the Israeli flag, while the other half were primed with a control image, a scrambled picture of the flag’s elements.
The surprising result: People significantly moderated their opinions in the flag condition vs. the control condition, moving more toward the center of the political spectrum when exposed to the flag. In addition, people stated more middle of the road voting intentions when exposed to the flag, and a follow-up call revealed that they actually voted more centrally as well. The authors’ conclusion?
In all three studies, the subliminal presentation of national flags increased unity by drawing participants to the political center.
I have written before in this blog about the the question of whether nonconscious processes need to be “protected” from stimuli that trigger them. The need for protection is derived from a belief that these processes are somehow more vulnerable than conscious processes, and further, that stimulating them can make us do things (specifically, buy things) that we wouldn’t do if that stimulation were routed through our conscious deliberation processes.
We explored some of the history of this concern in a post about the influence of Vance Packard and the myth of the “hidden persuaders”.
We saw how this concern has motivated questions about regulating subliminal messages, and the implications of that for constitutional protections of free speech.
We reviewed recent research on TV ad effectiveness that shows how nonconscious or barely conscious (low attention) processes can influence attitudes toward brands in the absence of conscious deliberative processing, but also that conscious deliberation can undo those effects relatively easily.
We presented a counter-view of nonconscious processes in a post that described how such processes provide a set of implicit sensing tools that actually facilitate, rather than hinder, our ability to control the influx of messages and signals we receive every second of every day.
Posted
on September 17, 2009, 2:30 pm,
by Steve Genco,
under advertising.
A clever series of experiments is reported in the Journal of Consumer Research dealing with how people respond to advertising in context. Researchers Hao Shen, Yuwei Jiang, and Rashmi Adaval had people read pages from a mock magazine that contained articles (movie reviews for a film festival) and an ad (for a watch). Participants were randomly assigned to four groups based on whether the movie reviews were presented in an easy-to-read or hard-to-read font and whether the watch was explicitly associated with the articles (as a sponsor of the festival). The watch ad was always presented in an easy-to-read font.
This seemingly innocent manipulation of the stories (they were identical in content) led to some interesting results. As summarized in a JCR press release:
The researchers found that “as the difficulty of reading the movie review increased, participants found it easier to process the advertisement and evaluated the watch more favorably. However, when the watch was listed as a sponsor of the film festival, the negative feelings elicited by the difficult-to-read movie review apparently spilled over to the watch. That is, as difficulty in reading the movie review increased, evaluations of the watch became more negative.”
I admit it, I’m a sucker for any argument that turns an established paradigm on its head. It’s hard to beat that little thrill you get when you realize everything we thought we knew may be wrong!
My favorite iconoclast in the advertising research world is Robert Heath, a former ad man turned academic whose home base is the University of Bath in the UK. Since the publication of his first article in 2001, Heath has pursued the heretical view that attention to advertising may actually be bad – in some circumstances (e.g., TV ads) and for some purposes (e.g., brand-building). His position is based on four interlocking arguments:
Brand-building occurs through emotional connections, not persuasion.
Most advertising assumes its purpose is persuasion, and therefore assumes it has to attract a high level of attention to deliver its persuasive message.
The best advertising actually works through emotional processing, not persuasion, and emotional content is processed most efficiently at low levels of attention, not high.
Therefore, brand-building is best achieved through emotional advertising that generates positive feelings and gets associated with a brand through simple repetition, not rational persuasion. High attention to the advertising itself does not support this process, and may actually inhibit it.
Posted
on August 28, 2009, 10:26 am,
by Steve Genco,
under Uncategorized.
You might have noticed a couple of interface changes here at Lucid Thoughts.
First is our cool new header. Special thanks to Srini, author of our lovely plainscape Wordpress template, for the step-by-step instructions.
Second is the addition of “Read the rest of this entry” tags to all our posts, so you can now more easily scan through the posts without risking repetitive motion injury.
We hope these changes make reading Lucid Thoughts a little more user-friendly.
I’m taking this opportunity for a “two-fer” because both these items draw attention to a central dogma of fMRI interpretation that is particularly prevalent in the popular media. I call it “locationism” because it’s the belief that thoughts and mental functions happen at specialized locations in the brain, so if you just watch a particular location “light up”, it tells you what someone is, quite literally, thinking.
Posted
on August 23, 2009, 12:59 pm,
by Steve Genco,
under preconscious.
Jeff Hawkins was the founder of Palm, the company that gave us the first usable PDA (sorry Apple Newton, it wasn’t meant to be). It ends up that Jeff really wanted to be a neuroscientist when he grew up, not a Silicon Valley bazillionaire, so when he left Palm he started thinking again about his first love, the prefrontal cortex, and produced a fascinating, readable book with co-author Sandra Blakeslee called On Intelligence (2005).
I think the book has met some mild resistance among “real” neuroscientists, but I find myself rooting for the scrappy amateur among the pros, because I happen to be one myself (but without Hawkins’ resources, unfortunately), and Hawkins is, without question, a really smart guy worth of anyone’s attention who is interested in this topic.
What I want to introduce here is the concept of preconscious prediction.
