UX University

The first UX University was held on the 2nd of December 2009. We invited 20 people who attended to meet with UX experts and learn about subliminal persuasion. Martijn Veltkamp, expert for subliminal research, held a succinct presentation explaining the idea of subliminal persuasion and introducing some interesting researches.

What is subliminal priming?

Subliminal priming describes the activation of existing knowledge concepts in the brain, through unconscious primes in the environment. Subliminal messages are used everywhere, from advertisement over the presidential election campaign in the USA to self-help tapes.
Subliminal – below the treshold of consciousness.This means that people are not consciously aware of a cue or prime and/or they are not aware of the behavior that is caused by it.
Martijn Veltkamp defines three stages of unconsciousness.

The extreme case – People are neither aware of the prime, nor of their behavior because of it.
Moderate case – This case is the most common one; people are not aware of the prime but well aware of their behavior.
Mild case – People are aware of the prime as well as their behavior because but they do not see the connection. This case can be found in product placement.
The ideomotor principle, an idea from William James (19th century), sais that people imitate other people’s behavior in order to learn. It is Neurologically proven that people understand for e.g. a movement by repeating the movement themselves. Even words related to an action increase the possibility that people follow that action.

This ideomotor principle or priming effect was first shown in a study by American priming researcher Chen Bargh. Interviewed people would imitate a certain behavior of their opposite, like rubbing their nose or tipping their foot. When asked after the test, no one was consciously aware to have performed those specific movements.

What is a prime?

A prime can be anything in the environment that activates inactive knowledge. A prime can be a table, a cup, a person’s behavior, etc.. Knowledge is part of a connected network in the brain. By activating such a network, it is likely to also activate connected knowledge and this way trigger a certain behavior.

Creating subliminal primes is not as easy as it might seem. Martijn Veltkamp points out three important issues that need to be considered. First of all the information being primed needs to be simple. Whole sentences or even videos as used for self-help tapes in the 50th century don’t work. Second, there is a method called Masking. Through masking, primes can be hidden within different information and therefore become subliminal. Last but not least primes have to be chosen carefully. Not all primes work for everyone the same way.

Cues & primes used in research

There is a wide range of different priming effects proven in research. So showed Chen Bargh 1996, that certain content, people are confronted with, can have influence on their behavior. In his experiment, two groups of people were asked to built grammatically correct sentences, using a range of given words. One group was given words mainly referring to elderly people and one group was given neutral words. Afterwards, the pace in which the participants walked back to the elevator was measured. It was significant that those participants given words referring to the elderly, walked slower that the othe rparticipants. There are other interesting experiments showing the priming effect of direct and indirect wordings, odors, brands, symbols and colors.

When is subliminal priming effective?

In his own research, Martijn Veltkamp showed that subliminal priming is not always effective. He found out that the priming effect depends of one of the three following conditions. The priming effect increases if the behavioral prime motivates to do something, if the primed behavior is positive or has a positive effect or if the priming matches a specific need.

An experiment showed, that neutral behavior can be primed with positive associations. If for e.g. a neutral behavior as gardening is primed with something positive as friendship, objects that refer directly to gardening appear to be bigger than they actually are.

We thank Martijn for the interesting presentation and are looking forward to the upcoming UX University.