Abstract:

Recent theoretical and experimental studies suggested that preferences, attitudes and impression formation can be developed outside of an individual's beliefs about object's attributes. In the present paper three experimental studies offers empirical support for such an assumption. The general objective of the study was to evaluate the impact of subliminal stimulation on attitude change. In fact, we have tested the ecological validity of the manipulating potential of subliminal stimuli, through a preference expression task, using legal nonwords targets. Our results showed that (1) the subliminal affective conditioning has a superior effect compared with the simple subliminal exposure; (2) the attitude manipulation efficacy for the lexical stimuli (artificially created) is dependent on the difficulty of verbalization and on the degree of the phonological or orthographical similarity with common lexical items; (3) the effects of the subliminal affective conditioning does not depend on the particular connotation of the conditioned stimuli (positive or negative); (4) the effect of the subliminal messages has a relatively short persistence.

Keywords: changing attitudes, subliminal affective conditioning, advertising