Effectiveness of subliminal messages in television commercials: Two experiments.

Subjects watched television commercials, monitoring them for a message (the words choose this) presented at different levels of contrast with the background. Following each commercial, subjects rated their intention to respond positively to it. In Experiment 1, neither detected nor undetected messages affected these ratings compared with a no-message control condition. In Experiment 2, incentives produced higher ratings with detected messages; with undetected messages the effect was statistically ambiguous and only one-tenth as large. Unexpectedly, in both experiments commercials containing undetected messages were subsequently less likely to be remembered than commercials with no messages. The tiny effects of subliminal (undetected) messages compared with the large effects of supraliminal (detected) ones are discussed in relation to the hazards and difficulties of placing them. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)