Now, listen to part of a lecture on this topic in a psychology class.
(male professor) Consider this experiment. Two groups of people were asked to watch TV and while they are watching a picture flashed on the screen less than a second, very quickly so it was barely noticeable.The picture was a boy with a birthday cake. Now, like I said, there were two groups and each group saw a slightly different version of the picture. One group got the boy looking angry, in fact, he was actually throwing the cake on the floor. The other group got a picture of the boy smiling, happy, holding up the cake like he was offering it. Same boy, same cake but different emotions expressed in each picture.Everyone was then asked to look at a different image. Now, this is a third image, right? Again, it's the boy and the cake, but this time the image stayed on the screen. In this picture, the boy's just holding the cake basically no emotion on his face, everything very neutral.Now, remember, nobody knew they’d already seen a picture of this boy. After a minute, everyone was asked to describe the boy’s personality. Those who’d been exposed to the image of the angry boy, they generally described the boy’s personality negatively. Those who’d earlier seen the happy boy described him, well, positively."
Describe what subliminal perception is and explain how the experiment discussed by the professor illustrates this phenomenon.
The perception of a stimulus just below the threshold of conscious awareness is called subliminal perception. There's an experiment to illustrate this. In the experiment, two groups of people are told to watch TV. Meanwhile the researchers flash two different photos of the same boy through the screen, one with the boy angry, smashing a cake on the ground, while the other one with the boy happy, offering the cake. Anyway, this happens very quickly so that no one in the groups is aware of the photo. Then the researcher shows both groups a third picture of the boy in which the boy's holding the cake without any expression. And the researcher finds that the first group describes the boy negatively while the second group describes him positively. This suggests that even without awareness of the perception, subliminal perception still has impact on people's attitude. (131 words)
