Your Subliminal Mind Is Your Actual Mind
By: Mitchell Diamond
Tags: Culture, Consciousness, Psychology, Motivation, Education

Photo by Markos Mant on Unsplash

We don’t know why we do what we do.

John Bargh is a Yale psychologist who studies automaticity, human behaviors that bypass consciousness and are unconscious reactions to environmental or internal stimuli. Bargh, who posits that over 99% of human behaviors are automatic and below consciousness, found that any behavior that can be attributed to conscious motivations can alternatively be found to be triggered by automatic mechanisms that bypass consciousness.

Testing conscious versus unconscious influences is frequently done by means of subliminal priming. In a typical study, researchers ask the subjects to perform a language task such as a word puzzle or word association. Unknown to the subjects the words are weighted for a particular bias or stereotype. In a second, presumably separate, follow-up experiment, the researchers test the effect of the priming. For example, priming words related to aggression would be tested to see if the subjects would be more likely to give longer shocks to collaborators for giving “wrong” responses, or, in the case of the generosity prime, would subjects be more likely to perceive others as altruistic.

Bargh described a set of experiments in which college students in an introductory psychology class, the typical guinea pigs, were asked to construct a sentence from a series of words. Unbeknownst to the subjects, one group received elderly priming words like old, gray, bingo, and retired that were selected based on a previous study of the elderly stereotype. A control group received neutral words. After completing the task, the subjects were instructed to go to another room and inform the experimenter that they had finished. The true test of the experiment was to measure the time it took the subjects to walk to the experimenter. The hypothesis was that the group who had received the elderly words would take longer to walk to the experimenter. Indeed this is what was found. Bargh concluded that “exposing individuals to a series of words linked to a particular stereotype influences behavior nonconsciously.”

Photo by Sina Katirachi on Unsplash

In another study, Bargh gave subjects a tedious and repetitive computer task. As the subjects, all non-African Americans, performed the task, subliminal pictures of either African-American or Euro-American male faces were flashed on the screen. When a subject reached the 130th task, the computer put up a failure message that instructed the subject to begin the task from the beginning. The reactions of the subjects to this bad news were recorded on video. Reviewers, who had no knowledge of the purpose of the experiment or which of the two face groups the subjects had seen, rated the subjects’ reactions on a hostility scale. The results indicated that those who had been shown the African-American faces displayed more hostility than those who saw the Caucasian faces. As a check, the experimenters gave the participants two questionnaires to evaluate racial feelings. Racial attitudes were found not to be correlated to the hostility measures. Also, the subjects were interviewed afterwards to see if any of them were aware of the faces that were flashed. Only two of the 41 subjects stated that they saw the faces, but these two were unable to identify the race of the faces. None of the participants perceived the experiment was about race

Experimental priming results in consistent and significant behavioral changes. When subjects are debriefed and told about the priming, they invariably report that they are unaware of any priming taking place. In fact subjects often suggest that, while others are probably vulnerable to the modulating effects of priming, they themselves are not. It’s identical to people who proclaim that they are immune to advertising even though they realize that others are susceptible to the onslaught of promotions we encounter daily in the media.

Studies show that virtually any behavioral modality is susceptible to priming effects. Social norms, emotions, goals and motivation, social behavior, and knowledge structures (stereotypes and trait constructs for use in comprehension and encoding of information) all respond to priming. Even the concept of achievement as a motivational goal was shown to lead primed subjects to overcome difficult tasks, obstacles, and interruptions. Subjects who were achievement primed were more likely to continue working longer at tasks than non-primed controls.

“Such effects are ubiquitous and pervasive across the major forms of psychological phenomena,” Bargh says. Not only that, but any one particular priming stimulus has multiple effects: changing goals, judgments, affective response and more. Priming produces a range of altered behavioral outcomes compared to non-primed controls.

John Bargh

These subliminal studies are controversial. Doubters challenge the accuracy and implications of these experiments. Sometimes follow-up research doesn’t always confirm the conclusions, but boatloads of other studies using subliminal stimuli reinforce the basic premise.

Marketers and advertisers leverage this knowledge and spend millions of dollars determining what will entice you to buy their products. This is why stores dispense pleasant scents near their entrances. This is why you see the same commercials repeated over and over again. Researchers know the availability bias works. It “is a self-reinforcing process of collective belief formation by which an expressed perception triggers a chain reaction that gives the perception of increasing plausibility through its rising availability in public discourse.” In other words, if you repeat something over and over again, it becomes true. This is a common technique used in the political sphere to rally the masses. The availability bias is an essential component of propaganda and works all too well.

In his popular book, Predictably Irrational, Professor of Behavioral Economics Dan Ariely asserts, “We are pawns in a game whose forces we largely fail to comprehend. We usually think of ourselves as sitting in the driver’s seat, with ultimate control over the decisions we make and the direction our life takes; but, alas, this perception has more to do with our desires — with how we want to view ourselves — than with reality.”

This is not meant to criticize people’s motivations, but only to emphasize different inclinations at work and that people are unaware of these forces. Humans have the self-sense that they accurately perceive the world around them and consciously deliberate in order to make decisions in their own best interests. People do make decisions, but any conscious deliberation is primarily rationalization. The actual contributors to behavior are opaque, and we humans have no knowledge or insight into the mechanisms or reasons that result in our actions.

“While these [unconscious motivational] influences exert a lot of power over our behavior,” Ariely says, “our natural tendency is to vastly underestimate or completely ignore this power. These influences have an effect on us not because we lack knowledge, lack practice, or are weak-minded. On the contrary, they repeatedly affect experts as well as novices in systematic and predictable ways. The resulting mistakes are simply how we go about our lives, how we ‘do business.’ They are a part of us.”