
Guide students through an exploration of the following questions:ġ. Such perception would have to be capable of influencing thoughts, feelings, and/or behaviors.Įxplain that you will spend the rest of the class session tackling this first claim, i.e., that it is possible to perceive stimuli outside of conscious awareness - or, following Bargh’s (2016) distinction - that it is possible for our thoughts, feelings, and/or behaviors to be influenced by stimuli without our awareness. It would have to be possible to perceive stimuli outside of awareness.Ģ. Use this discussion to guide students toward the following framework:ġ. Highlight for students the range of ways in which so-called subliminal influence is being attempted in their examples, and ask them to consider what would need to happen for this influence to succeed.


Also ask students to read (or review) basic information (in the textbook or elsewhere) on the differences between sensation and perception, top-down versus bottom-up processing, and automatic versus effortful or controlled processing. Many of these may have been mentioned already – the students’ job is to try to find actual examples of songs, video clips, images, and so on. Tell students that, as homework, they should find examples of attempts at subliminal influence. Tell students that in the next unit, you will be exploring questions about what subliminal influence is, if and how it can be studied scientifically, and the extent to which we know the answer to questions about whether subliminal influence is real.
Subliminal messages in music full#
View the full collection: Busting Myths in Psychological Science This unit is structured to get students to think critically about the claim, the kinds of evidence that would support or refute it, and the underlying psychological mechanisms that would be necessary for the claim to be true.


It is relevant to students’ daily lives and provides opportunities to discuss applied research in social psychology, behavioral economics, and marketing. Discussion of this myth provides rich opportunities to integrate topics across research methods, memory, cognition, sensation and perception, and social psychology. This is a topic that is almost certain to interest students, and one that is ripe for discussion in an introductory psychology class, because the truth behind the claim is complicated.
