The present study includes three experiments that look at folk beliefs across four different countries (UK, U.S., Canada, Australia) on the topic of the uses (misuses) of the application of psychological research on the unconscious manipulation of behaviors in the real world. Participants were asked to volunteer examples of everyday experiences they have had where they think psychological research on the unconscious has been applied to manipulate their behavior (Exp 1).
In the next set of experiments (experiments two and three) people were asked to make judgments about those everyday examples in terms of the extent to which their free choice was affected, along with the extent to which their behaviors were influenced by the manipulation of their unconscious, the extent to which the conscious control of their behaviors was impacted, and the extent to which this conflicted with their conscious intentions.
The first experiment reveals that across all four countries, for which there was no difference between countries (that is, across the UK, U.S., Canada, and Australia, the responses were similar), approximately 45 percent of the examples given were in the category of marketing/advertising—such as subliminal advertising. The next most common was research—approximately 19 percent, and then approximately 7 percent of the examples were in the domain of politics (especially political campaigning to influence voting behavior), and approximately 4 percent generated examples that related to the media more generally.
Also, interestingly, more liberal and centrist people generated examples related to the use (misuse) of psychological research to manipulate behavior unconsciously in marketing/advertising than conservatives.
In the next two experiments the findings showed that for politics, while people think that psychological research might be applied to influence their behavior unconsciously, they judge that they are still able to exert more free choice in their voting behaviors, as compared to application of psychological research in therapeutic situations (e.g., hypnotherapy, placebo) for which they judged that they had less capacity for free choice and conscious control of their behaviors.
This study reveals two critical things. The first is that subliminal advertising still exists as a phenomenon when, in actual fact, this is a myth, and more importantly, psychological research over the past 60 years has shown that subliminal advertising cannot reliably influence our consumer behavior.
The second is that while people across several different countries consistently volunteer examples where they think psychological research on unconscious manipulation might be applied to affect their political voting behaviors, across these countries (including the UK), they still judge that they are able to maintain free choice and conscious control. This is important in political climates where reporting on complex campaigning tactics might be used to persuade voting behavior in ways that suggest that people are persuaded to make choices that they are unaware of.
These findings show that across age, gender, religiosity, different educational background, political affiliations, and countries, people still believe that the choices they make are their own and that those choices are under their own conscious control. This challenges the messaging that might be promoted more widely in the media.