Buying In - (Page 49) buying in 49 theories of subliminal marketing, exemplified by “the popcorn hoax.” This notorious incident from the 1950s involved a man named James Vicary claiming to have boosted popcorn sales at a Fort Lee, New Jersey, theater by flashing the words Eat Popcorn for one three-hundredth of a second during the showing of a film. Under challenge to replicate this extraordinary claim, he eventually admitted that he had trumped up the data. Scary stories about subliminal marketing have continued to pop up over the years, but they are invariably debunked. An number of articles mocking subliminal advertising and those who believe it works have said, in so many (or in one case these exact words: “People don’t walk around in a semitrance; buying is a rational, cognitive process.” That’s a comforting thought, but, in truth, debunking silly hoaxes proves no such thing. The vast majority of our brain’s activity—98 percent of it, by one estimation—happens outside of conscious awareness. This is a theme of behavioral economics, a field that has gotten quite a bit of attention in the past few years. A good deal of the breakthrough research in the field was conducted by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who in the late 1970s and early 1980s basically applied cognitive science to a new realm. For example, they published work indicating that people make decisions about risk partly in reaction to how a problem is framed—their risk tolerance changes depending on the wording of the question they are asked, even if the issue described is, in reality, identical. Other research has dealt with a variety of human foibles: Most people think they are better-looking, smarter, more talented, even that they are better drivers, than most other people, and we unconsciously overestimate our control over situations that turned out well and downplay our responsibility for things that don’t, and so
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