独家优惠奖金 100% 高达 1 BTC + 180 免费旋转

Whose Is Whose? The Media Is Making Your Decisions for You

Can you remember the most recent commercial you watched? Was a handsome stranger raving about a car that costs more than your house? Was a elderly woman delivering an uncomfortably wholesome monologue about some product you could never quite figure out? You may have encountered this commercial minutes or even seconds ago.

Chances are, you don’t remember any of it.

We, as a population of ravenous media consumers, encounter an overwhelming amount of these cryptically influential advertisements on a daily basis. As unsettling as it sounds, the average American wastes an entire hour of their day reading, watching, and listening to ads. To put this in perspective, a single hour per day amounts to fifteen days per year (or two and a half years of your life).

Suffice it to say, that’s a lot of ads, far too many for your already bustling brain to commit to memory. So, more often than not, your brain adopts the role of a passive observer. Instead of encoding and understanding, your brain surrenders itself to the flood of media drowning your eyes and ears.

If you don’t believe me, think back to the last time you plopped yourself in front of the TV. After ingesting every second of your favorite drama, how much attention did you award the random ads that popped up in the middle?

I would guess somewhere between very little and absolutely none.

A typical hour time slot dedicates around 16 minutes to commercials; yet, those 16 minutes leave behind little more than a smudge in your memory. Your brain tunes them out like background noise, no different from the cars honking outside your window or the dogs barking at the end of your street.

But wait… isn’t that a good thing? Can those advertisements influence your decisions if you can’t remember them?

Unfortunately, the media has a much more substantial impact on your opinions, preferences, and lifestyle than you realize. You may forget every commercial you have ever watched. You may never notice your opinions changing, but the simple truth is…

Your mind is consistently being made up for you.

All this talk of commercial manipulation raises an important question: what strategies does the media use to influence your life? How can a seemingly harmless, 30-second advertisement change something as significant as your values or lifestyle?

Before we dive headfirst into the nitty-gritty details, I want to address one all-too-common misconception about the media, specifically about advertising. Many people insist that advertising is a simple and straightforward game.

It isn’t.

Much like a museum-goer that misunderstands the world-renowned art hanging on the walls, the average person has minimal knowledge of the nuts and bolts of a successful advertisement. There’s much more to it than a memorable logo or a catchy jingle. Anyone can craft an ad. Anyone can make a sale; however, persuading a diverse audience of consumers is a more nuanced and challenging feat.

To get a better understanding of how the media affects you, why don’t we explore what it means to be persuasive. The basic definition of the term is rather vague:

The media, however, puts their own spin on it. For any ad worth its salt, persuasion acts like the finish line or end goal. Advertisers ultimately want to sell products, build brands, and create trends. They need to persuade an audience to make the right decision time after time.

Unfortunately for advertisers, the average adult is a war-torn veteran in the world of media consumption. We have seen it all — the good, the bad, and the ugly — so the media relies on a variety of innovative techniques to maintain a firm grip on their audience.

One such technique, which you likely encounter on a daily basis, sells a brand or product in the form of an experience. Commercials for pickup trucks, for example, dedicate their brief runtime to camping, construction, or the rugged outdoors.

Despite hardly touching on the specifics of their product, these advertisements impact consumer preferences by creating meaningful connections in the minds of their audience.

By immersing their product within a feeling, lifestyle, or experience, it adopts a new set of unconscious associations. Their truck becomes synonymous with the outdoors, and the outdoors becomes synonymous with their truck.

Your brain loves to make these assumptions. In fact, it’s been jumping to presumptuous conclusions for your entire life. By transforming their product into an experience, the media encourages you to jump to their own set of conclusions.

Creating an experience is one of the more popular tactics in advertising, but it is far from surprising. Most of us realize when these commercials are trying to pull the wool over our eyes; however, one persuasive technique has flown under the radar for decades. While most adverts are selling their hearts out, this tricky tactic lodges itself in your memory by doing the unthinkable.

It contradicts itself.

Introducing the sleeper effect, one of the best-kept secrets in the advertising industry. This perverse phenomenon emerged in the 1940s, when it was discovered by psychologist Carl Hovland.

At first, these ads had very little impact on their viewers, far less than their competitors. Over time, however, their influence grew exponentially. They silently crept into the minds of their audience, ingraining their messages deep into the viewers’ behaviors and preferences.

And just like that, the sleeper effect was born.

Carl Hovland was both intrigued and confused by this unexpected discovery. How could such ineffective advertisements leave a lasting impact on their viewers?

Hovland’s subsequent work explained that an advertisement must satisfy two conditions to activate the sleeper effect:

It is no secret that repetition is an incredibly effective tool in the advertising industry. The more times you watch an advertisement, the stronger its effect will be. Even if you don’t remember the content, consistent exposure still expands the influence of any subliminal message.

What really sets sleeper ads apart is the second condition: the discounting cue. A discounting cue is a visual or auditory stimulus that intentionally undermines the validity of the advertisement. In other words, a discounting cue makes a message less believable.

Imagine a marathon runner who purposely trips at the beginning of the race. The average observer would assume he doesn’t stand a chance. Nevertheless, he wins the marathon, because his competitors run out of steam.

Sleeper ads are designed to play the same kind of waiting game, essentially shooting themselves in the foot by applying a discounting cue. These ads don’t care about impacting your opinions right away. They hide in the background, and then slowly sneak up on you, thanks to a cognitive process called dissociation. Over time, your brain will naturally dissociate or separate a discounting cue from the bulk of the advertisement.

In other words, the negative stimulus will drift away, leaving behind a message that has become much more persuasive. All of the sudden, an unfounded piece of media has changed the way you think. Scary, isn’t it?

Their study was remarkably simple. College students from a random sample were asked to read a controversial news article. At the end of the article, researchers added a short note, which explained that the article was riddled with inaccurate data. After reading something that strips the article of its validity, would you put any stock in what it has to say?

As backwards as it sounds, you, like those college students, would probably fall for the same trick. Each student knew perfectly well that the article was not credible; yet, their opinion changed significantly by the end of the study. The discounting cue scared the college students off at first, but, when tested at a later time, most students supported the article’s controversial message.

This 1978 study proved to the scientific world that the sleeper effect was not a bizarre coincidence. It is a real and effective persuasive tactic that opens the door for a deeper, more unconscious form of control in the media.

It has been decades since these researchers left their mark on the world of advertising. So how has the sleeper effect developed over the years?

Unsurprisingly, the influence of the media has increased exponentially into the 21st century. Advertisers have pioneered new ways to make their messages stick, many of which are direct descendants of Hovland’s original discovery.

Delayed fear is a popular example. If an advertiser wants to present something as dangerous, such as alcohol or drug use, they don’t create a commercial that leaves their audience shaking in their boots. They could, but those bone chilling messages strike fast and fade even faster.

Instead, an advertiser would create a mildly frightening commercial, followed by an obvious discounting cue. Using humor or poor quality, the ad takes advantage of the delayed impact of the sleeper effect. Their sleeper ad would rarely scare anyone, but its message would successfully produce a long-term, aversive response.

With silent killers like the sleeper effect invading your brain on regular basis, it’s hard not to reconsider every tiny decision you make. When you grab one brand of potato chips over another, stop and think about why. Has some unconscious assailant transformed the way you think? More importantly, where do your tastes and partialities actually come from?

The good news is they may not be entirely foreign. Your opinions, preferences, and habits have a strong foundation in your nature and your environment. The bad news, however, is that advertisements have been nudging you one-way or the other for your entire life. Using these crafty persuasive tactics, the media has its hands in your cookie jar… and it isn’t stopping anytime soon.

Sources

Gruder, C. L., Cook, T. D., Hennigan, K. M., Flay, B. R., Alessis, C., & Halamaj, J. (1978). Empirical tests of the absolute sleeper effect predicted from the discounting cue hypothesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36, 1061–1074.

Hovland, C. I., Janis, I. L., & Kelley, H. H. (1953). Communication and persuasion. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Hovland, C. I., Lumsdaine, A. A., & Sheffield, F. D. (1949). Experiments on mass communication. (Studies in social psychology in World War II). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Hovland, C. I., & Walter, W. (1951). The influence of source credibility on communication effectiveness, Public Opinion Quarterly, 15(4), 635–650.

Kumkale G., & Albarracín D., (2004). The sleeper effect in persuasion: a meta-analytic review. Psychol Bull, 130(1), 143–172.

Pratkanis, A. R., Greenwald, A. G., Leippe, M. R., & Baumgardner, M. H. (1988). In search of reliable persuasion effects: III. The sleeper effect is dead. Long live the sleeper effect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54(2), 203–218.

Add a comment

What is your view?

Send

Related posts:

Trick or Treat

On the streets you see ghosts and witches and ghouls. A child’s laughter inside gives the weakest of men chills. They knock on doors with bags in hand. Happily singing, “Trick or treat!” while…

Growth With a Touch of Love!

Loving yourself is critical to how you treat others and how you treat others is critical to your personal and career growth. On my journey to truly understanding the meaning of love, I’ve learned…

Buy Google 5 Star Reviews

Google reviews are the online ratings of the place, business, and maps of Google sites. It is the Google reviews that will appear first in search results. You can see the good or bad reviews of the…