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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
I came across an interesting post in ScienceDaily – Consumer Behavior yesterday about how people draw inferences from seemingly neutral packaging features. The referenced article is by two Canadian researchers:
Hammond D, & Parkinson C (2009). The impact of cigarette package design on perceptions of risk. Journal of public health (Oxford, England) PMID: 19636066
The ScienceDaily post [...]
A thread that runs through quite a number of the journalistic treatments I read about neuroscience applied to commercial stimuli (like ads, products, and brands) is fear … fear of a “Manchurian Candidate” technique that will turn people into consuming robots, fear of privacy, fear of science being co-opted by greedy corporations at the expense [...]
We put another downloabable document on the Lucid website today called “Tell me something I don’t know: Consumer insights from preconscious processes.” You can grab a copy on our download page here.
The article was inspired by a client who sent us the following request:
I was asked by a senior manager for an example of the [...]