And there have been some intriguing results here. While the Coca-Cola movie-theater study was a hoax, it seems to have inspired a line of research about what subliminal messages can do to make people thirstier. But subliminal messages might be able to influence your drinking habits in other ways Yet that story still lives on in many minds as fact.

And other researchers were never able to replicate the results. This study was a total hoax, Vicary later admitted, made up to boost his marketing company.

The messages? 'Eat popcorn' and 'Drink Coca-Cola.' The result? Popcorn sales went up 58 percent, and cola sales went up 18 percent. Vicary and Frances Thayer said they'd spent six weeks showing messages on movie screens so quickly that moviegoers didn't realize that they were there. But this study was actually a total hoax.īack in 1957, James M. The popular concept of subliminal messages was shaped by a famous study in which researchers claimed that flashing 'Drink Coca-Cola' messages in a movie theater got people to buy more soft drinks. Researchers have been studying them for decades, and here's what we know now: It's not true that advertisers convinced people to drink Coke by flashing messages in a movie theater And they can influence people in all different sorts of subtle ways. (He wrote an interesting post recently on subliminal messages over at Psychology Today.) But that isn’t true,' says Ian Zimmerman, who researches consumer psychology and implicit cognition at the University of Missouri–Columbia. 'The general belief is that are pretty powerful and that they can get us to do all sorts of things that we don’t want to do. Many psychologists, for their part, are skeptical of how much subliminal messages can do. The fracas was part of a debate that's surrounded advertising for many decades: Do subliminal messages actually work? Are we at the mercy of unconscious cues being pumped into our heads by unscrupulous corporations? Or is this all just a bunch of nonsense? Gore staffers first brought it to the attention of the New York Times, which ran a story in which several experts said it looked like an attempt at subliminal messaging. Near the end of the ad, the word 'RATS' quickly flashed on the screen, barely noticeable, before the words 'BUREAUCRATS DECIDE' appeared. Bush's campaign aired an attack ad against Al Gore's health-care plan that featured a bizarre quirk. Back during the 2000 presidential election, George W.

Subliminal messages to become shorter