Personality Characteristics And Time Effect Of Subliminal Persuasion Under The Effect Of Motivation

Subliminal persuasion refers to the use of subliminally presented stimuli or messages presented to individuals beneath their awareness, that are intended to influence their views, attitudes or behaviors. Subliminal advertising became notorious in 1957 through the publicity surrounding James Vicary, a market researcher, who claimed to have substantially increased sales of Coca Cola and popcorn by 18% and 58% in a movie theatre, by secretly and subliminally flashing the message "Drink Coca Cola" and "Eat popcorn" in six weeks. Although the existing researches inspect the effect of subliminal persuasion from different respects, but still can’t provide any direct evidence to prove that subliminal persuasion exists, which leading to the dispute about subliminal persuasion in academic circles. This situation may has the relationship with awareness, subliminal semantic activation, the current motivation and habits. Until recently, psychologists reproduced subliminal persuasion effect successfully, and found that the current motivation is a key to subliminal persuasion process, which caused a new round of upsurge of research.This study used the laboratory experiment method, and the participants in this study were undergraduates and postgraduates, who were unknown about the real purpose of this study. By controlling the thirsty degree and the reaction time, the study discussed personality characteristics and time effect of subliminal persuasion under the effect of motivation. And the study wanted to find out other limitations and internal mechanism of subliminal persuasion, so as to provide more reasonable explanation to the failures of previous studies, and finally could provide more supporting evidence for this field.Study 1 was a validation study, which wanted to see whether subliminal persuasion can work under the effect of motivation with cross-cultural consistency. Study 2 was an exploratory research, which wanted to find out the changes of subliminal persuasion effect during three kinds of time delay (without delay, delay 30s and 60s delay). Study 3 preliminary discussed the role personality factors played in subliminal persuasion by using 16PF, which tried to explore other internal mechanisms or factors of subliminal persuasion.The results show that:(1) Compared to non-thirsty participants, thirsty participants are more susceptible to subliminal persuasion.(2) Delay will weaken the effects of subliminal persuasion, subliminal persuasion can only influence the current behavior, and the time effect is very short.(3) Gender has a moderating effect on Self-Reliance and subliminal persuasion, males are affected by subliminal persuasion as Self-Reliance increased, female subjects is the opposite, namely males who have stronger independence and females who have stronger dependence are more susceptible to subliminal persuasion.