What You Expect Is What You Believe (But Not Necessarily What You Get): A Test of the Effectiveness of Subliminal Self-Help Audiotapes

Pratkanis, Anthony R.; Eskenazi, Jay; Greenwald, Anthony G.

doi:10.1207/s15324834basp1503_3

Cited by 14 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…In general, visual stimuli are not well established, and numerous studies claim they are useless. Pratkanis et al [ 42 ] reviewed more than 200 works and concluded that none of them provided reliable evidence that subliminal messages influence behavior. Many of these works did not find the desired effect, while those finding an effect suffered from methodological flaws.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Breaching Subjects’ Thoughts Privacy: A Study with Visual Stimuli and Brain-Computer Interfaces

Pérez

Beltrán

Bernal

et al. 2021

Journal of Healthcare Engineering

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Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) started being used in clinical scenarios, reaching nowadays new fields such as entertainment or learning. Using BCIs, neuronal activity can be monitored for various purposes, with the study of the central nervous system response to certain stimuli being one of them, being the case of evoked potentials. However, due to the sensitivity of these data, the transmissions must be protected, with blockchain being an interesting approach to ensure the integrity of the data. This work focuses on the visual sense, and its relationship with the P300 evoked potential, where several open challenges related to the privacy of subjects’ information and thoughts appear when using BCI. The first and most important challenge is whether it would be possible to extract sensitive information from evoked potentials. This aspect becomes even more challenging and dangerous if the stimuli are generated when the subject is not aware or conscious that they have occurred. There is an important gap in this regard in the literature, with only one work existing dealing with subliminal stimuli and BCI and having an unclear methodology and experiment setup. As a contribution of this paper, a series of experiments, five in total, have been created to study the impact of visual stimuli on the brain tangibly. These experiments have been applied to a heterogeneous group of ten subjects. The experiments show familiar visual stimuli and gradually reduce the sampling time of known images, from supraliminal to subliminal. The study showed that supraliminal visual stimuli produced P300 potentials about 50% of the time on average across all subjects. Reducing the sample time between images degraded the attack, while the impact of subliminal stimuli was not confirmed. Additionally, younger subjects generally presented a shorter response latency. This work corroborates that subjects’ sensitive data can be extracted using visual stimuli and P300.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To emphasize subliminal stimuli ineffectiveness, Pratkanis et al [ 42 ] conducted a study of retail audio tapes containing subliminal messages aimed at improving either self-esteem or memory. Neither self-esteem nor memory improved in any of the subjects.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Breaching Subjects’ Thoughts Privacy: A Study with Visual Stimuli and Brain-Computer Interfaces

Pérez

Beltrán

Bernal

et al. 2021

Journal of Healthcare Engineering

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“…Approximately half of those who thought they had received the self-esteem tape, regardless of whether they had actually received it, stated that their selfesteem had risen; similarly, about half of those who presumed correctly or not that they had received the memory tape asserted that their memory had improved as a result of listening to it. The title of the Pratkanis, Eskenazi, and Greenwald (1990) investigation-"What you expect is what you believe, but not necessarily what you get"-seems fitting.…”

Section: Subliminal Self-help Productsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A third reason for attributing positive effects to subliminal tapes relates to expectancy effects, as clearly demonstrated by Pratkanis, Eskenazi, and Greenwald (1990; see also Greenwald, Spangenberg, Pratkanis, and Eskenazi, 1991). These researchers recruited individuals through a newspaper advertisement soliciting volunteers who were especially interested in subliminal self-help tapes and thus were likely to resemble the people most likely to purchase such products.…”

Section: Subliminal Self-help Productsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Selected alternative training techniques in HRD

Bergen

Soper

Rosenthal

et al. 1997

Human Resource Dev Quarterly

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Over the years a number of training techniques and procedures have been developed that are not part of the mainstream but are believed by some to have utility for organizations trying to enhance human pevformance. This article discusses four of these alternative techniques-subliminal self-help, mental imagery and practice, meditation, and Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP)-and examines the contributions of each from a scient$c perspective. With the exception of mental practice, there is a paucity of data to demonstrate convincingly whcther thesc alternative techniques promote or enhance individual or organizational effectiveness. It is concluded that effective professional practice depends on scientlfically derived research results.Training and development has historically been plagued by charlatans hawking this or that program or approach as having a significant positive impact on profits, effectiveness, absenteeism, turnover, and so on. Fads and techniques that come and go abound in this discipline: participation training is the style for a few years, then total quality management training surfaces; management by objectives comes and zero defects goes; T-groups are the darling of training professionals for a while; time management is "in" and job enrichment is "out"; Kepnor-Tregoe is popular for a time and then the one-minute manager takes its turn in the spotlight. Although these approaches are generally considered mainstream, others that have app eared are less traditional but also have significant followings proclaiming their effectiveness.As a class, the latter techniques are considered extraordinary; they are developed outside of mainstream science and are accompanied by extreme claims for high effectiveness (Austin and Miller, 1992). These claims are often

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“…The reconstructive nature of memory, false memory syndrome and potentially suggestive memory recovery techniques, alien abduction reports, multiple personality disorder (Acocella, 1998;Blackmore, 1998;Loftus, 1993;Lynn, Lock, Myers, & Payne, 1997;Nash, 1987;Spanos, 1994) (Pratkanis, Eskenazi, & Greenwald, 1994). Topics in abnormal and clinical psychology courses can include the research methods necessary to validate novel assessment and psychotherapeutic techniques.…”

Section: Class 12mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Teaching of Courses in the Science and Pseudoscience of Psychology: Useful Resources

Lilienfeld

Lohr

Morier

2001

Teaching of Psychology

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Several authors have increasingly recognized the problem of pseudoscience as a major threat confronting psychology and allied disciplines. We discuss the importance of courses in science and pseudoscience to undergraduate education in psychology and provide (a) a model syllabus for courses in the science and pseudoscience of psychology, (b) a list and description of suggested primary and supplemental texts for such courses, (c) a list of useful educational videos on science and pseudoscience, and (d) suggested Web sites that offer critical evaluations of pseudoscientificclaims. Finally, we briefly review the literature concerning the efficacy of courses in the science and pseudoscience of psychology and offer suggestions for future research in this area.

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What You Expect Is What You Believe (But Not Necessarily What You Get): A Test of the Effectiveness of Subliminal Self-Help Audiotapes

Cited by 14 publications

References 33 publications

Breaching Subjects’ Thoughts Privacy: A Study with Visual Stimuli and Brain-Computer Interfaces

Breaching Subjects’ Thoughts Privacy: A Study with Visual Stimuli and Brain-Computer Interfaces

Selected alternative training techniques in HRD

The Teaching of Courses in the Science and Pseudoscience of Psychology: Useful Resources

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