Good day, everyone. Some countries, for example, Australia, the UK and the US have laws to prohibit the use of subliminal advertising.

Just in case you're wondering what subliminal advertising or priming is,

it is the use of visual or auditory messages that are indiscernible at the conscious level but can affect people's preferences.

However, the effect of these messages are highly doubted. So do they really work?

We are curious about its effect. So we put it to the test.

We have prepared in total two short songs, one with a looped subliminal messages ("Pepsi") and another one without.

And now, let me demonstrate to you the one with the messages.

("Pepsi, pepsi, pepsi, pepsi, pepsi")

We asked sixty people to join our experiment,

thirty of them listened to the song with the message and the other listened to the one without.

And then, we asked them which drink they prefer, Coke or Pepsi.

And here are some of their responses.

Coke.

("Pepsi?") Yeah!

Subliminal priming effect has been studied by numerous psychologists since

nineteen-eighties and it is yet under discussion whether it can have an influence on our preferences and behaviors.

For our current experiment, we expected more people responding "Pepsi" after listening to the primed song.

From the figures we obtained, there is indeed a difference of number of choices from the two groups.

However, our current result is statistically insignificant.

Although this may suggest that subliminal stimuli

or at least subliminal messages that are hidden in short audio clips

are somewhat unlikely to have impact on our preferences,

more research in this area is yet needed to be done for further confirmation due to the complexity of this question.

Thank you very much for watching this.

We hope to bring you more videos on the application of psychology in our daily life in the future.

Bye bye!