There seems to me to be several ways we can challenge the idea of subliminal perception and the most direct one is to question of the legitimacy of the concept of threshold as a fixed line above which we claim to experience a stimulus whether that is a weak light, faint sound or light pinprick or, with less stimulus energy, sense nothing. Exploring absolute thresholds was part of what was known as psychophysics in the latter part of the nineteenth century (Peters , 1962, pp. 580–591) when laws or regularities of the relationship between physical measurement and sensory experience were proposed, most notably by Gustav Fechner. The marriage between psychology and physics however was not a happy one as the reductionist demands of physics with the different senses measured using a variety of thresholds did not go together with even the simplest observations of the Gestalt psychologists where the whole percept that is seen, heard, smelt or felt is certainly more than the sum of its parts. Also there was a degree of uncertainty or an ambiguous zone between not seeing and seeing for example, which could not be resolved by setting an arbitrary 50% ‘threshold’ 21 just to get a number with figures beyond the decimal point. The marriage between physics and psychology was fraught as the demands for accuracy as a way of settling arguments and the well-defined definitions that characterise the way of physics did not always fit in with the ways of psychology.
With the benefit of hindsight one can see different theories of perception emerging in the latter part of the twentieth century. Instead of a simple boundary between perceiving and not perceiving a stimulus there was a zone of uncertainty where one thought something might be out there or perhaps not. Signal detection theory (Green & Swets, 1966) was able to formalise some of the principles that humans use in this zone. Attention became an integral part of the perceptual process and Treisman’s work (Treisman, 1969) showed that selective attention was not a simple switching from one channel to another as Broadbent (1958) claimed but that information would get through the unattended channel and was processed. Here we find the origins of a standard assumption in twenty-first century psychology; that there is simply too much information in the world for us to cope with but we manage to by developing schemata that categorise and classify the world and strategies that work quickly and efficiently without us necessarily being aware of them. This occurs as we grow up from infancy onwards as a product of both what is inherited as a member of Homo sapiens and our environment . There were other broader, cultural shifts that while not quite defining a zeitgeist might assist in the acceptance of alternative models of perception. One was an interest in states of consciousness and the problematic nature of ‘unconscious’ as ill-defined being sometimes confounded with a lack of awareness in contrast to being conscious and aware. General psychology textbooks in the 1970s would often include a chapter on consciousness, reflecting an interest by those of student age (and some of their teachers) in altered states of consciousness and the wonders of the inner world—an interest and obsession that was characteristic of the 1960s in both North America and Europe. The rather mechanistic models based on information flow through channels that characterised much of the work on selective attention in the middle of the century would sit uncomfortably with the more fluid and extended experiences that could be found in the altered states of consciousness literature. More recently, the digital technology involved in creating worlds of virtual and augmented reality demonstrate that it can both replace and add to the different parts of our perceptual experience as we move toward a world where the senses and perceptual systems can be enhanced as a matter of course.
In conclusion the idea of subliminal perception needs to be removed from the lexicon of consumer psychology. It is confusing and is based on poor or even bad theory. I may exhort you to do this but as I have no way of policing the results of my efforts, be prepared to meet it again in other books and journals. What we do need to welcome though is ‘perception without awareness’ which raises the interesting problem ‘how do I know that I’ve seen 22 something if I’m not aware of it?’ We’ll look at the evidence first and then try and explain it and that will lead us into a world of hidden processes of the mind. But there are ways of getting in and exploring these implicit processes.
The Evidence for Priming
As mentioned above in the Introduction there are far too many papers to comment on individually so we need to find summaries and digests of the findings. Bargh (2006) in a review of the literature from the previous 25 years on priming social knowledge cites several classic priming studies. Kahneman (2011) describes, using non-technical language several priming papers in Chapter 4 of his book. There are an interesting and relevant group of papers looking at priming in the specific context of brands and I will look at them in more detail here. But first I’ll discuss some of the more popular general findings in the field.
The experimental paradigm often used in this research usually involves an experimental and a control group and statistical comparison of results between these two groups. Vohs (2006) primed student participants with money by giving them a task involving word-sorting where the words referred to money-related concepts like ‘salary’ and ‘pay’ or even just getting them to do a task where the computer had a screen saver showing dollar bills floating in water. This provided a situation where the concept of money was primed. The results showed that the experimental group demonstrated more self-reliance, showed less willingness to help others, put more physical distance between themselves and a new acquaintance and in general money made you more individualistic and less communally oriented toward others (op. cit., p. 1156). John Bargh and his colleagues published a paper in 1996 (Bargh et al., 1996) that according to Kahneman (2011, p. 53) became an instant classic. They used a similar word-sorting task as Vohs (op. cit.) in order to prime the idea of older people and see if some of the stereotypical ideas we hold about this social category can be influenced by a simple prime. None of the students were aware of the purpose of the experiment although they were debriefed later. They were then thanked and asked to leave and were surreptitiously timed as they walked down the corridor. The experimental group walked more slowly than the control group. The argument was that priming stereotypes of the elderly had occurred and this influenced the subsequent and necessary behaviour of walking away from the experiment after completion. Interestingly, the reverse priming sequence has also been demonstrated. Mussweiler (2006) asked students to walk slowly round a room and afterwards they were quicker to recognise words related to old age such as forgetful, old and knit when presented with them in a list of non-words and real words and told to respond using a response timer if it was an actual word. Indulging in stereotyped behaviour can prime stereotype content in one’s mind. The link between behaviour and mental processes where the mind affects the behaviour seems natural and normal. After all that’s how we go about our daily routines surely—we think then do. We make up our minds. But the priming experiments seemed to demonstrate the reverse also happens where behaviour affects the mind. For example in an early experiment (Wells & Petty, 1980) students were asked to either move their head from side to side, or up and down with a third control group receiving no instructions at all. These sorts of experiments involve mild deception usually with a cover story which in this case involved a headphone testing scenario where the movement was supposed to be related to how comfortable the headphones were and the dependent measure of participants’ opinion of a message played over the headphones fitted in nicely with the scenario. Participants were randomly assigned to a group, put the headphones on and listened. As expected, students who were primed with the side-to-side movements tended to disagree with the message and those who were primed with up and down movements tended to agree. Gardner , Gabriel, and Lee (1999) were interested in deep cultural values and in particular whether one’s dominant cultural values were interdependent and independent. We often think about ourselves and our friends and family and the question arises: What is the dominant way in which we do this? Is it independent so I usually think about my
self as autonomous and not attached to or influenced by others? Or am I part of a wider network and collectively in a mesh of different relationships with others? The culture we live in usually pushes us in one direction or the other and the language we speak codifies these two aspects as (in English) ‘I’ or ‘we’. Gardner et al. (op. cit.) simply primed members of two cultures with individualistic pronouns (e.g. ‘I’, ‘mine’) or collectivistic (‘we’, ‘our’) by asking them to circle all the pronouns in a short story. Of course one group (collectivist) would only get collectivistic pronouns in their story and the other group (individualist) 23 would read a story with only individualistic pronouns. The two cultures were Hong Kong Chinese and European-American and the language used was English as the HK Chinese participants were fluent bilinguals. The results with both cultural background (two groups) and priming (two groups plus control) 24 show some interesting interactions as the priming and cultural background factors play out in each set of results but the main conclusion is clear. Although independent or interdependent construing might be found across the world different cultural practices have a role to play as some will encourage independence and others encourage interdependence (op. cit., p. 325).
Before we turn to the section dealing with brand priming let’s pause and ask the question ‘what’s all the fuss about?’ Priming is a topic that often attracts attention from the media. One of the reasons was that some of the experiments are difficult to replicate. For example Doyen , Klein, Pichon, and Cleeremans (2012) got no priming effect when they repeated the famous experiment of Bargh et al. (1996) even though the equipment was more sophisticated. In a series of news reports published by the internationally respected journal Nature, Yong (2013) reported that out of 13 effects examined for replicability, the two that were not replicated at all were social priming effects where the primes were money and the US flag. These repeat studies did not prime in the sense of the money prime influencing endorsement of a current social system and the US flag changing values in the direction of more conservatism, as had been claimed. However there is more to priming than just one idea triggering another, a concept that goes back to the great philosopher David Hume and probably earlier than that. Priming affects us without us being aware of it happening. This challenges our sense of being in charge of our own minds. When we add an iceberg metaphor and suggest there’s a lot of mental activity going on that we are not aware of as nine-tenths is below the surface, then we are providing a sinister side to the debate. But it doesn’t stop there. Priming reaches parts of the mind other techniques don’t reach. A simple picture or word can affect whole value systems, and intentions to behave in the future. If you feel a vague sense of recognition here then you’re not alone. We’ve been here before. Sigmund Freud was vilified in his time because his theories pushed so many buttons and unleashed so many anxieties at the beginning of the twentieth century. The same ingredients are there. The unconscious has been transmuted into the place where perception without awareness 25 occurs and the stuff of the unconscious if found in deep (and by implication profound) recesses. If you add the child to the mix as Freud did and horror of horrors suggested that children are sexual creatures, then we have a recipe for moral outrage and panic.
Brand Priming
So far the evidence base has been drawn from the general literature on priming in social psychology for example and other areas. There is some published research however that is of specific relevance to consumer psychologists and that is work done on brands and priming. I make no claims of complete coverage and I have tried to cover work that is theoretically or practically interesting, as well as relevant to the purpose of this book. Probably the best known paper in this area is Fitzsimons , Chartrand, and Fitzsimons (2008). They present a balanced case that brands might or might not act as primes and a strong brand can acquire a human-like personality with the potential to act as a prime and reach mental places other less iconic brands can’t. Apple is such a brand and is embedded in the culture of the United States with a strong image related to imagination and creativity . The priming involved presenting an Apple logo for 13 milliseconds with an 80 milliseconds pattern mask 26 just before and after the logo. The control presentation was an IBM logo. No participant reported seeing images during the priming task and no one guessed that they had been exposed to brand logos. The results were clear—those participants who were in the Apple group performed better on a test of creativity than those who were in the IBM condition. It’s important to establish just what has been established with this experiment. Certainly perception without awareness has been demonstrated. None of the students in the groups who were shown Apple or IBM brands were aware of these brands being shown very briefly but yet changed their behaviour in the predicted direction on the test of creativity . However the test of creativity is one that measures different uses for common objects like a brick and assesses divergent thinking , just one aspect of the creative process. Being exposed to certain brands is not a sure-fire way to expand your creative talents. What is likely happening here is that the Apple brand is activating a drive or motive to think in a more divergent and imaginative way so that the search for ideas becomes more wide-ranging. It’s a cultural phenomenon as the Apple brand symbolises that and it can, without you being aware of it, enable you to think slightly differently.
Brennan (2015) has criticised the Fitzsimons et al. (op. cit.) experiment on the grounds that the participants in the original experiment were drawn from an elite group who had achieved very high scores on standardised university admissions tests. When Brennan ran the same experiment with participants with a wider range of test scores, those who scored average did not show enhanced creativity but those at the high end of the range did. In addition the fact that Apple sponsored the research and that this fact was on each page of the creativity assessment was not mentioned in the original experiment by Fitzsimons et al. However the fact that Apple was primed in the original experiment without participants reporting any awareness of seeing it, although we now know that could be confounded by the footnote about sponsorship still remains and Brennan recognises that. More work still needs to be done in this fascinating area. Some more conceptual clarity is needed about what exactly creativity is. In my opinion divergent thinking is being assessed and a ‘creative person’ is someone who has both the cognitive wherewithal that is measured by conventional intelligence tests and divergent thinking aka creativity as well. The Apple brand can prime without awareness and the mental processes operating here are relatively simple where access to already available skills is enhanced. But Apple doesn’t make people creative. It makes some responses to the test more salient; the imaginative uses of ordinary objects are probably there mentally and would be produced with a bit more time and effort by the participants. They are probably already there in the minds of participants and just need making explicit in highly intelligent participants. Which can be done quicker and therefore more are produced in the experimental group simply because these divergent responses are associated with the Apple brand and therefore are more salient.
Red Bull , a soft drink loaded with added caffeine and sucrose has a strong brand image associated with risk taking, speed and excitement. Brasel and Gips (2011) looked at students playing a videogame involving car racing where the cars had different brands painted on their sides including one with Red Bull . The intention of the research was to see if the brand characteristics would prime the goal -related behaviour of racing, albeit within the confines of a (realistic) videogame. Interestingly when the Red Bull drivers were timed they were not the fastest. Some were at that end of the distribution but others were at the slowest end. The reason is that the concept of ‘high risk’ was the one that had been effectively primed by the brand and for some participants the high speed was too much so they went off track where the surface is programmed to slow the speed. Other more skilled ones managed to overcome the risk with skill and maximise both speed and accuracy.
Brands don’t exist i
n isolation and are embedded in various contexts as part of consumer ecologies. I see them on TV and in computer games played on smartphones and tablets. They’re there on shelves in supermarkets and on shelves in your kitchen and in your fridge. Researchers recognise this and are interested in finding out if the role of context influences the perception of the brand. For example we encounter brands in print advertising in newspapers in the context of news stories and brands can be influenced by them. Shen and Chen (2007) created print ads for fictitious electronic devices and systematically varied the copy surrounding them in a mock-up magazine. They found both immediate and long-term priming effects on the ads from the different kinds of copy and concluded that information in the context of the brand could influence how people see the claims the brand is making (op. cit., p. 78). Gao and Li (2013) discovered that news that portrayed China in a negative light influenced readers’ attitudes toward iconic American brands such as Nike and Coca-Cola in the predicted direction. Berger and Fitzsimons (2008) make a strong case that environmental cues play a significant role in brand recognition at a conceptual level. For example, the experiment referred to in the title of their paper showed that if you had seen a picture of a dog before then you are more likely to recognize Puma as a sneaker brand (op. cit., p. 11). The reason for this is priming at a conceptual level. The authors have done a range of experiments based on the theory that environmental primes have the potential to increase mental accessibility 27 of the brand, so that it would be chosen more frequently relative to other competing brands, and be rated more and more positive as the links between primes and brand become more frequent. I would suggest then that the consumption ecology of the brand should be designed so that these prime-brand links are established in order to optimise accessibility, evaluation and choice.
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