The Popcorn That Never Sold: Subliminal Myth Versus Evidence

In September 1957, a market researcher named James Vicary held a press conference and announced the results of an experiment conducted at a cinema in Fort Lee, New Jersey.

Over six weeks, he said, the messages Eat Popcorn and Drink Coca-Cola had been flashed onto the screen during a film for a three-thousandth of a second, at five-second intervals — far too briefly to be consciously perceived. Popcorn sales, he reported, had risen by 57.8 percent and Coca-Cola by 18.1 percent.

The reaction was immediate and enormous. Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders had just been published. Newspapers wrote about mind control. The National Association of Broadcasters banned subliminal advertising. Several countries legislated against it. Public anxiety about the technique has never really abated.

The study did not happen, or at least not in any form that produced those numbers.

Vicary could never produce the data. Attempts to replicate the effect — including one run by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which flashed Phone Now during a program and received no increase in calls — failed. In a 1962 interview with Advertising Age, Vicary conceded that the study was too small to be meaningful and that he had done little more than repeat a gimmick to attract attention to his consultancy. There is reasonable doubt as to whether any experiment was conducted at all.

What subsequent research has established is narrower and duller. Subliminal presentation can produce small, transient priming effects under laboratory conditions — a subliminally presented brand can slightly increase choice of that brand among people who are already thirsty, in the minutes afterwards, in a controlled setting. It does not produce behavior in the wild, it does not create motivation that was not already present, and it does not survive the conditions of a cinema.

Which makes this chapter's real subject the durable manipulation rather than the fictional one.

The persuasive event was the press conference. A supraliminal claim, delivered by an apparent expert, repeated by every newspaper, and installed as common knowledge for seventy years — chapter 25's illusory truth effect, operating on a claim about subliminal persuasion.

The third-person effect compounds it: Davison's finding that people consistently believe media influence affects others more than themselves. Subliminal messaging is a satisfying fear precisely because it is a fear about other people's vulnerability.

The study did not happen, or at least not in any form that produced those numbers.

And that misdirection has a cost. Attention spent on invisible messages is attention not spent on the visible techniques in the rest of this part, all of which are documented, legal, and operating right now.

The Judas Priest trial in 1990, in which two families alleged that backward-masked messages had caused their sons' suicides, is the same displacement conducted in a courtroom. The court found for the band.