FREE ESSAY ON SUBLIMINAL MESSAGES

SUBLIMINAL MESSAGES

Are you sure that you aren't being subconsciously manipulated into making decisions that
you wouldn't normally make? Are you sure that over the next few days, your purchases of
popcorn and Coke will be completely under your conscious control? Are you even sure that
I haven't embedded secret messages into this research paper to manipulate you into giving
me an A? If you didn't consciously perceive "secret messages" but you did perceive them
subconsciously, then they would be called subliminal. The word "subliminal" literally
means "below the threshold" (Encarta 99). The threshold is the level at which you are
aware of stimuli, so if something is below the threshold, or subliminal, you are not
consciously aware of it. Therefore, you may be receiving messages and obeying them
without even realizing it! What I have set out to prove through my research report is
that people are being manipulated by the media through subliminal advertisements.
Subliminal advertisements stimulated significant public attention in 1957. It was
reported that a motion picture theater in New Jersey had flashed subliminal messages on
its movie screen during the showing of the movie Picnic. These messages appeared on the
face of the actress Kim Novak every 32 seconds and urged the audience to "Eat popcorn"
and "Drink Coca-Cola" over a course of six weeks. 49,699 people viewed these subliminal
messages. The movie theater reported that its concession sales increased 58%. Some people
just dismissed this as a publicity stunt or believed that you can't be affected by
something you can't perceive. The truth is that nobody has ever been able to reproduce
this result. However, this incident caused many people to take interest in the subject of
subliminal perception. One such person was Vance Packard who wrote the very popular book,
Hidden Persuaders, which appeared in the London Sunday Times as an account of the whole
New Jersey ordeal. 
People who hear of subliminal messages often ask how something that isn't perceived
consciously can be perceived subconsciously. This confused me at first too, but through
my research I have come to realize that it is really quite simple. When you are in a room
with 50 people that are talking, but you are only conversing with one person, you can
still hear all 50 people. You consciously perceive one person's voice, but those other 49
people's voices don't just go in one ear and out the other. You may not realize that you
are perceiving those other voices, but you really are. Those other voices would be
subliminal. Another example of how something that isn't perceived consciously but can be
perceived subconsciously, is if you were to sit down and just list everything that you've
seen in the past hour. You would probably come to a large number, but you couldn't
possibly list everything you've actually seen. You could just look outside and
consciously perceive hundreds of things, but when you really think about it, you probably
actually perceived millions if not billions of things. When you look at a car driving
down the street, you don't just see the car, passengers, and the street. You also see
every blade of grass lining the street, the little boy playing off in the distance, and
the house across the street with the white shutters and shingled roof. 
Now that I've established that there is a conscious and subconscious mind, I will explain
both. The conscious mind has the privilege of accepting, rejecting or modifying
perceptions. For instance, if the conscious mind listens to someone say that they are
stupid, it could accept, reject or modify it. However, if it is the subconscious mind
that listens to this statement, then it just accepts it and believes that it is stupid.
Ironically, however, the beliefs held in the subconscious are the source of why the
conscious accepts, rejects, or modifies the statement. 
Many advertisers take advantage of this and try to embed subliminal messages into their
advertisements. Advertisers' subliminal messages often concentrate on the taboos of
society to stimulate the mind. Such taboos would be sex, which is often the most common
focus of advertisers, death, incest, homosexuality, and sometimes even pagan icons.
Disney movies have displayed, and have been sued for, embedding subliminal messages. In
their movie, The Little Mermaid, they show the male genitalia as a part of the castle.
People may think that people were just trying to find perverted things in innocent Disney
movies, but apparently it wasn't innocent enough to keep it on the cover. The newer cover
does not display a castle on it. Another subliminal message involving Disney is in the
movie Aladdin. Right before he sings the song A Whole New World, Aladdin says, "Take off
your clothes" under his breath. My last example of a Disney related incident involving
subliminal messages is in the movie The Lion King. When the king lion falls off of the
cliff, you can see that the dust around him and the stars in the sky spell out the word
"Sex." There are many subliminal messages in our products today, but one I find most
disturbing is the Camel Cigarettes' advertisement. The Picture on the left shows a man
standing proudly with his genitalia erect. The picture on the right shows the camel that
is named the "Smooth Character." If you look at his nose, you will come to realize that
it is in fact the male genitalia.
(Key xviii) (Key xix)
There is proof that shows just how influential these ads were to the marketing of Camel
cigarettes. In 1978, there were seven surveys taken by 3,400 smokers between grades seven
through twelve in Georgia, Louisiana and Minnesota and it showed that Camels were
preferred by less than .05%. However, in 1988, RJR Nabisco launched the "Smooth
Character", a cartoon camel modeled after James Bond and Don Johnson. 5,000 children from
California were polled and 22% of girls were smoking Camel cigarettes, and 24% of boys
were smoking Camel cigarettes! This was a significant rise from the original .05%!
Another study showed that children were as familiar with the "Smooth Character" as Mickey
Mouse! Even if the sexual subliminal messages weren't intended, or effective, it still
gives off the subliminal message, "Smoke Camel cigarettes, and you will be cool and
attractive!" Both males and females are grossly manipulated by images just like these,
which say that if you wear a certain designer's clothes, or drink a certain soda, or
smoke a certain cigarette, that they will be cool and beautiful just like the "beautiful
person" in the advertisement! Subliminal messages can be as disturbingly simple as that.
There seems to be three people in particular who know a lot about subliminal perception
and advertisements, and those people are Wilson Bryan Key, Ph.D, William Bryan Cane, and
Eldon Taylor, Ph.D. They have showed up many times in my research so I believe that they
all play an important role in my research report.
The first man that I mentioned was Wilson Bryan Key. He is famous for the uncovering of
subliminal images in advertisements. He argues that "not only are we being subliminally
merchandised today but the public has been subliminally seduced for hundreds of years"
(Subliminal Learning 27) He has lectured to people about how the "advertising industry is
using subliminal messages to manipulate the public" (Chen 1). 
In 1988, there was a case in Reno regarding the parents of a boy who committed suicide,
which Wilson Bryan Key claims to have been caused by the musical group Judas Priest. He
claims that this group "included in a song, at a low, subliminal level, the words "Do
it!"" (Ethics of Subliminal Research 1). In the end, the judge concluded that the words
could be heard but that there was no evidence that they would have been able to trigger
someone's suicide without the aid of the suicidal thoughts that the boy had previously
engaged in. 
Wilson Bryan Key has also brought up the subject of the just how intentional subliminal
messages are in advertisements. He has said that "these images do not appear by accident,
coincidence, or as the work of an individual artist. Rather, advertising agencies spend
three to five months and upwards $50,000 to scrutinize every detail in each
advertisement" (Chen 1) 
The second man that I mentioned was William Cane. "William Cane" is the pen name of
Michael Christian who teaches English at Boston College. He was educated at Boston
College Law School and has been lecturing college students about subliminal messages for
fourteen years. He has concluded that "one of the biggest problems facing college
campuses as well as society is the use of legal drugs" (Cane 1) He said that his lectures
show "what advertisers are doing to hook youngsters into lifetimes of addiction" (Cane
1). 
The third man that I mentioned was Eldon Taylor. He has written many books going deep
into how subliminal messages work and their effectiveness. He discusses the earliest
modern references that he has found on the subject of subliminal communication such as
Sigmund Freud and the areas of the brain that get affected by subliminal messages. 
One of Edmund Taylor's major topics in his books is about just how legal subliminal
advertisements are. This is, in my opinion, the most disturbing part about my topic. The
truth of the matter is that there are currently no laws whatsoever forbidding the use of
subliminal advertisements. This means that a commercial on television could flash a
message manipulating you into buying it, and you would never even know, but yet it is
perfectly legal. Eldon says that there are many reasons as to why subliminal
advertisements are legal. One reason is that the public reaction of the movie situation
in New Jersey back in the late fifties to the early sixties ended where it began. "What
was considered by Newsday as "the most alarming invention since the atomic bomb" has been
shuffled away to "dirty mind" arguments and ghosts that go bump in the night" (Subliminal
Communication 10). People just believed that what you couldn't hear couldn't hurt you,
and that what you couldn't see, you didn't see because it wasn't there. Several states,
and even the United States Senate have introduced legislation to prohibit subliminal
messages in public communication media, but no legislation has ever been enacted. People
that were interviewed by Eldon Taylor about subliminal advertisements were said to fall
into one of two groups: the group that believed that they did not work, or the group that
believed that they were against the law. This is extremely alarming that nobody is
actually aware of what they are being exposed to because the media is legally
manipulating us! Some actual examples of how subliminal messages are currently being used
are that in some malls, music containing the subliminal message, "Buy/Don't steal" is
being played, and that there are some video rental stores that have subliminal messages
flashed throughout some of their movies to rent only their videos!
The main argument that is keeping subliminal advertisements legal is that they do not
work. There hasn't been enough evidence to prove that they work because subliminal
advertisements are a fairly new field of study. It is really still in the investigative
stages. However, though there really isn't any scientific proof that subliminal messages
work, there are many testimonies saying that they work from people who have used
subliminal messages in a positive way. I will mention a few of these testimonies to give
you an idea of just how effective subliminal messages worked for some people. I have
taken these testimonies out of Eldon Taylor's book, Subliminal Communication: Emperor's
Clothes or Panacea? A woman named Marilee had more than two hundred warts on her hands,
and tried to have many of them burned off. After using a subliminal wart-removal
audiotape for thirty days, the warts had completely vanished. Six months later, the warts
had still not returned. Another woman named Judee Goddard bought a subliminal weight-loss
audiotape to play secretly to her husband. After thirty days, Mr. Goddard had lost
twenty-six pounds, and was never informed of the subliminal program. My last example is
of a man named Vern Water. His mother purchased a stop-loss-of-hair tape for him. He had
already lost most of his hair because of what seemed to be male pattern baldness, but
after listening to those tapes for less than one month, he began to grow new hair. After
approximately two months, he had a full head of hair once again. 
These testimonies and this research paper certainly didn't prove my research topic, which
was that people are being manipulated by the media through subliminal advertisements, but
it did show that there is definitely a good possibility that subliminal messages may
work. We also must remember that just because we don't have the technology or knowledge
to fully understand subliminal messages quite yet, doesn't mean that they don't work. If
we do some day find out that subliminal messages do actually work, then we will realize
just how badly we have been manipulated all of these years. However, there could also be
a very negative side to that, which would be that we would know for sure that they work
and then there would always be that definite possibility that people were manipulating us
constantly to do whatever they want. This is where you have to wonder if we should ever
really know. It all comes down to the mathematical fact that even when there's a lot of a
positive, if there's a bigger negative, then it's still negative. Scientists will
probably continue to study subliminal messages until we have it all figured out because
of our need to learn, and hopefully, our newfound knowledge will be exclusively positive!