Subliminal perception: an analysis

Abstract

A few years ago there was some popular interest in "subliminal advertising", a technique which was believed to communicate a message to potential consumers without their awareness (see McConnell, Cutler & McNeill, 1958). In psychological journals, this phenomenon is described as subliminal perception, discrimination without awareness, or behaviour without awareness The term "subception" is generally reserved for shifts in a person's sensitivity to stimuli and responses after an affective change, a phenomenon omitted in this study., the essential point of these descriptions being the implication that a person has received information unwittingly. Experiments in subliminal perception are objective attempts to test unconscious processes (or something equivalent) in the laboratory. The "subliminal effect" is quite easy to produce in certain ways (see Adams, 1957, p.388), and a demonstration of it was no doubt just as convincing to enthusiastic investigators as Psychopathology of Everyday Life was Freud. As a matter of fact, the connection between subliminal perception and theories of the unconscious is a close one; and it is true to say that the phenomenon of subliminal perception was known to psychologists before Freud developed his conception of the unconscious mind. Here we might review some history (culled mainly from Boring, 1950; Flugel, 1951; Murphy, 1949).