Effects of Subliminal messaging on the Social Imagination...

Does subliminal messaging really work?
By Tara Santora - Live Science March 13, 2020

Subliminal messaging was born in a New Jersey movie theater in the summer of 1957. During the Academy Award-winning film "Picnic," market researcher James Vicary flashed advertisements on the screen every 5 seconds. The interruptions were so fast — 1/3,000th of a second — that they were undetectable by the conscious mind. 

Yet the fleeting advertisements of "Drink Coca-Cola" and "Hungry? Eat Popcorn" reportedly increased Coke sales by 18.1% and popcorn by 57.8%.

Or so the story goes. Eventually, the president of the psychological test company Psychological Corp. challenged Vicary to replicate his experiment. After failing to re-create the gains in sales, Vicary admitted he had fabricated the results. Some experts believe he never completed the original experiment at all.

"Subliminal advertising is thought to be a pretty potent form of influence. But there's really not much on which to base that conclusion," said Ian Zimmerman, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota Duluth. However, the method is not completely made up. "Subliminal messaging can actually be influential," Zimmerman told Live Science. But its power is hedged by many if's, including whether the audience is in the mood for the product being advertised.

In theory, subliminal messages deliver an idea that the conscious mind doesn't detect. The brain may ignore the information because it is delivered quickly. For example, the word "RATS" flickered briefly across the screen during an attack ad that the George W. Bush campaign launched to smear presidential candidate Al Gore during the 2000 election. An influential word can also be shrouded by imagery, such as "sex" spelled out by ice cubes in a Gilbey’s Gin advertisement. Whether these attempts affected voters and consumers is unknown.

But scientists do know that subliminal messaging works in the lab. Researchers inserted a dozen frames of a Coca-Cola can and another dozen of the word "thirsty" into an episode of the TV show "The Simpsons." Participants reported being an average of 27% thirstier after the viewing than they were before, whereas the control group was slightly less thirsty afterward, according to a 2002 study published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology. Similarly, when given a subliminal priming of the iced tea brand Lipton Ice during a computer task, people chose the drink over another beverage — but only when they were thirsty, according to a 2006 study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. 

In short, it appears that subliminal messaging works best when it taps into an existing desire. "If we're not currently experiencing whatever kind of need or goal the subliminal message taps into, it probably won't be very effective," Zimmerman said. When subliminal influences do occur, they don't last long. Influences lasting 25 minutes are about the cap, according to a 2016 study in the journal Neuroscience of Consciousness. In other words, subliminal ads trying to get someone off the couch and into a store probably aren't effective. 

 

"They can't make you go buy something you don't want or vote for a political candidate you don't like," Zimmerman said. "The messages just aren't that powerful." ~ https://www.livescience.com/does-subliminal-messaging-work.html

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Subliminal messages exert long-term effects on decision-making

Simon Ruch, Marc Alain Züst, and Katharina Henke - Aug. 20,2016

However, though subliminal manipulation is often considered harmless because its effects typically decay within a second, subliminal long-term effects on behavior have been observed in studies which repeatedly presented highly familiar information such as single words... [(COVID-19 i.e?)]. 

These studies suggest that subliminal messages are only slowly stored and might not be stored at all if they provide new or unfamiliar information. Subliminal messages might affect delayed decision-making especially if messages contain several pieces of novel information that must be relationally bound in long-term memory. 

Relational binding engages the hippocampal memory system, which can rapidly encode and durably store novel relations. Here, we hypothesized that subliminally presented stimulus pairs would be relationally processed influencing the direction of delayed conscious decisions. 

Indeed, subliminal messages do exert diverse influences on our thoughts and our behavior (van Gaal et al., 2012; Hassin, 2013). Subliminal stimuli can facilitate conscious processing of related information (Van den Bussche et al., 2009), change our current mood (Monahan et al., 2000), boost our motivation (Aarts et al., 2008), and can even alter our political attitudes and voting intentions (Hassin et al., 2007; Weinberger and Westen, 2008). With such a broad impact, subliminally planted information might have the potential to alter our decisions in everyday situations  ~  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6204644/

aren't you sick 'of it' yet....

Agreement Reality ~ In the Space of the Social Imagination...

When you start reading this article, keep in mind the numerous discussions put forward on this blog about agreement reality. It is where we exist (in agreement) and the only place we can truly exist in any sense of being 'real'. Regardless, of what we think is happening as the process of reality that seem to define what is real whether using tools, telescopes, computers and whatever else... its only what we agree on that really counts and provides us with some kind of 'reality'... the social reality that is only located in the social imagination. And, understand the intention is not to mock or defame but to show the truth as it really is... in agreement reality ~ efg.

Since Edwin Hubble first discovered in 1929 that galaxies are getting farther apart over time, allowing scientists to trace the evolution of the universe back to an initial Big Bang, astronomers have struggled to measure the exact rate of this expansion. In particular, astronomers want to determine a number called the Hubble parameter, a measurement of how fast the cosmos is expanding as we speak. The Hubble parameter tells us the age of the universe, so measuring it was a major goal for many astronomers in the latter half of the 20th century.

The problem, however, is that measuring the Hubble parameter is, perhaps unsurprisingly, quite difficult. There are multiple methods for doing so, and modern observatories are coming up with different numbers depending on which method they use. It seems the number obtained based on the appearance of the universe shortly after the Big Bang is significantly smaller than the number obtained when looking at measurements involving objects closer by.

The early universe Hubble parameter, derived from observations by the European Space Agency's Planck satellite, tells us the universe is about 13.8 billion years old. Meanwhile, the local cosmos measurements might yield an age nearly a billion years younger. If that smaller age is correct, it throws off the entire timeline of cosmic history, and could mess up our understanding of when and how various major events happened in the evolution of the universe.

To be clear: This discrepancy isn't so huge that the Big Bang theory is in trouble, or that we have to rethink everything we know about the cosmos. But the discrepancy is large enough that some cosmologists — scientists studying the history and makeup of the universe as a whole — are suggesting the field is in crisis.

Adam Riess, the Johns Hopkins cosmologist who shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics, has argued strongly that we can't ignore the discrepancy, because it keeps appearing, over and over again, in too many independent local cosmos observations to be a fluke. "If the universe fails this crucial end-to-end test (it surely hasn't yet passed), what might this tell us?" Riess wrote in Nature. "It is tempting to think we may be seeing evidence of some 'new physics' in the cosmos."

That could be the case, but "I would say it's at least as likely that we still don't understand what all the subtleties in these measurements are," says cosmologist Arthur Kosowsky of the University of Pittsburgh (who was the author's Ph.D. advisor), "and eventually they'll converge to a single value [for the Hubble parameter]." (of course they will eventually converge because eventually we have to have agreement)

Indeed, the discrepancy could come down to little more than hidden biases in the measurements. To use an analogy, if you have an air rifle that pulls very slightly to the right as you shoot at a target, all your shots may be clustered around a single point, but that point will be to the right of the actual bullseye. The rifle introduces a systematic error to your normally good aim, right?

But the analogy is imperfect because in cosmology, we don't know where the "bullseye" (agreement) is: The precise value of the Hubble parameter can't be calculated independently of measurements. Complicating matters further, none of the observations measure the Hubble parameter directly. 

Instead, they link different observable phenomena to the rate of cosmic expansion. The trick is to use multiple independent measurements as a check on one another, hoping that any systematic effects can be spotted in the process. (hoping for agreement)

For example, the Planck satellite's early-universe observations — those that tell us the universe is expanding more slowly — are based on something called the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which is light left over from about 400,000 years after the Big Bang. However, we aren't seeing this light as it was way back then; we're seeing it after it's passed through clusters of galaxies and entered the Milky Way, with extra light from other sources added in. To get anything useful out of CMB data, astronomers have to subtract everything that isn't primordial; while they're very good at that, there might still be room for systematic bias in the way the subtraction is done.

Measurements based on closer objects — which yield a slightly younger age — are based on type Ia supernovas, which are the explosions of super-dense objects called white dwarfs; the pulsations of very large stars; and the gravitational distortion of light as it passes by galaxies. Each type of measurement has its own set of systematic biases that must be corrected (be made subject to agreement). It's also worth noting that while their Hubble parameter values are close to each other, they aren't in precise agreement either. In other words, all of these observations are complex enough that their results aren't completely settled.

New types of observation are underway, which might help identify where bias exists in Hubble parameter measurements. Removing those biases would bring the Hubble numbers into agreement.

But what if the numbers are right? That could be indicative of some previously unknown phenomenon in the very early universe, from the epoch before the first atoms formed. Perhaps dark energy, which we know is driving cosmic expansion to accelerate in the modern era, played a role far earlier than most cosmologists think. Maybe there are extra particles that were important when the universe was smaller and denser, but whose influence was diluted over billions of years. None of these possibilities are perfect, but whatever the right answer, it's a big deal.

"I don't have a crystal ball better than anyone else, but I think that these measurements are just really hard," 'cosmologist' Kosowsky says. However, his caution doesn't mean he wouldn't be happy to be wrong. "I'm rooting for it to come out the other way, that this is actually showing us something exciting about cosmology." (rooting for an agreement)

Online Source ~  https://www.yahoo.com/news/growing-crisis-cosmology-105501754.html

Full Title - The Growing Crisis in Cosmology found in 'The Week', Author: Matthew Francis, dated Feb. 20, 2020.