Many still hear of it in high-school or college classes or read about it in textbooks or articles. In 1962, Vicary admitted that he had actually done little research and that his database was "too small to be meaningful."Īlthough "The Popcorn Experiment" was debunked by the profession and discredited by its instigator, it is a story with a life of its own.
Vicary's claims set off a storm of protests and led to government prohibition of subliminal advertising. The best published account of "The Popcorn Experiment," writes Pratkanis, appeared in Senior Scholastic magazine, a periodical written for junior high school students.
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The Vicary study, announced in a press conference in September 1957, was never described in professional literature and has not been successfully replicated. In a nutshell, Pratkanis reports, psychologists have found no evidence that subliminal messages will alter behavior. Pratkanis analyzes the Vicary case and similar claims in his article in the spring 1992 issue of Skeptical Inquirer magazine devoted to myths of subliminal persuasion. The messages were "Eat Popcorn" and "Drink Coke," and the claimed increase in sales was about 18 percent for Coke and 58 percent for popcorn. Later I learned that the "popcorn" report actually came from businessman James Vicary, who said he tested the technique during screenings of the film "Picnic" for six weeks in 1956 at a theater in Fort Lee, N.J. My understanding was that the original experiment with subliminal selling occurred in the 1930s. The version I heard years ago was that images of hot, buttered popcorn were flashed quickly on the screen during feature movies, leading to a boom in sales from receptive viewers.
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Pratkanis of the University of California, Santa Cruz, recently asked a manufacturer of subliminal self-help audio tapes for evidence that they work, and the man replied, "Don't you know about the study they did where they flashed `Eat Popcorn and Drink Coke' on the movie screen?" Lots of people "know" that psychologists have developed brainwashing techniques that advertisers misuse, and the best-known example is "The Popcorn Experiment." People meet an English professor and they say, "Gee, I'd better watch my grammar." If you introduce yourself as a mathematician, someone will comment, "I can't even balance my checkbook."įor folklorists, a typical reaction is, "It must be great to make a living collecting jokes."Grammar patrol, computational whiz and joke collector sum up what many assume these jobs are all about.įor psychologists, the line might be, "You must be an expert in subliminal persuasion." I'm convinced there's a cliche to describe every academic speciality.
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