Thursday, March 20, 2008

Beyond Even My Fantasies

http://www.uni-bielefeld.de/psychologie/ae/Ae01/hp/scharlau/lehre/karremans.pdf

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Surprisingly, the topic of the study is accessible, interesting and even important. It even has some (albeit marginal) relevance/connection to the concerns of this blog.

My college thesis was on something like this, so I remember reading about the original 1957 reports (which hadn't yet been exposed as a likely hoax). I don't think I ever knew those reports originated with someone named Vicary; I first heard about them in Vance Packard's non-fiction best-seller, "The Hidden Persuaders," an expose of the advertising industry published in the 1960s. Of course, Packard assumed the "subliminal advertising" claims were real.

Later, in the '70s, another author produced a pair of supposed non-fiction bestsellers with "Subliminal Seduction" in the title. I didn't read them, but recall they claimed that lots of ads had hidden, emotionally laden words embedded in hard-to-see places (such as "Sex" within the ice cube in a drink pictured in a liquor ad). Those claims struck me as so implausible that although the books were around when I wrote my thesis, I didn't even bother to look at them.

Elizabeth Vicary said...

surprisingly?

NewBandOnTheBlock said...

No offense meant, Liz. I called it "surprising" merely because I (initially) assumed your sole reason for providing the link was that the article referred to "Vicary's fantasies"...a play on words that would have worked equally well even if the linked article had been a dense treatment of some obscure subject.

Anonymous said...

Don't know how that "Eva" got in. I made the last (and first) post but I'm not Eva. Someone else also uses this computer and must have it automatically set to attach their Blogger ID whenever posting from it.