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 [...]
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 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 [...]
In a recent post haranguing against the term “neuromarketing”, I referenced Mya Frazier’s front-page piece in Advertising Age back in September 2007, “Hidden Persuasion or Junk Science?“. As noted in that post, the neuromarketers she portrayed went more than a little overboard in their efforts to extol the virtues and magic of their techniques, and [...]
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 [...]
Professor Marc Blitz has posted a lengthy but very thought-provoking article over at Neuroethics & Law Blog about whether the First Amendment should protect “subliminal messaging”. He does not come to any hard and fast conclusions, but in good lawyerly fashion examines various arguments for and against the influence of deliberate and inadvertent subliminal stimuli, [...]
We have noted in this blog that polling has, well, issues that it needs to work through.
Cengiz Erisen is finishing up his dissertation in political science at SUNY Stony Brook. He recently shared with me an article he has co-authored with two of his Stony Brook professors, Milton Lodge and Charles Tabor. Titled “Affective Contagion [...]
What are some things perceived as beautiful and others not?
Neuroscience has a lot to say about this, and what it has to say is highly relevant to product design, packaging, and aesthetics.
In this post I’m only going to highlight one article written in 2004 by Rolf Reber, Norbert Schwartz, and Piotr Winkielman entitled “Processing Fluency [...]