People usually feel uncomfortable or reluctant to accept that their judgements or choices could be unconsciously influenced by information or suggestions to which they assigned little significance at the time of exposure, prior information not considered as relevant to a current event, or sensations they even hardly noticed. However, past research in psychology, marketing and consumer behaviour provides multiple examples for when and how such influences can and do occur. Consumer decisions may be influenced unconsciously by sensory stimuli and information, whether incidentally (i.e., in ‘natural’ settings, unplanned for) or by intent planning and execution of business or government organisations (e.g., through nudging, more positively, or manipulation, more negatively).

There has been particular interest (e.g., in advertising) over the years in possible effects of stimuli or information transmitted in a subliminal way (e.g., rapidly or masked), below a threshold of consciousness or awareness of those exposed to it. The emphasis therein is on consumers being unconsciously exposed to the information itself. But is subliminal stimulation really necessary to have an impact on consumers’ judgements or choices? First, there is still mixed evidence and debate on the stability or reliability of subliminal effects. Second, nonetheless, there is a view whereby it is the unconscious influence of the information that matters, which can occur even when the individuals were cognizant of the stimulus or information but ‘blind’ to its influence on their subsequent judgements and decisions.

The latter view is eloquently advocated by social psychologist John Bargh. Without dismissing the possible operation of subliminal stimulation, Bargh shifts the focus of discussion on unconscious influences from how the information is submitted (consciously or non-consciously) to what effect it can have and how the influence is taking place. In an instructive review article, “The Hidden Life of the Consumer Mind” (2022, [1]), he puts into order and clarifies in a reader-friendly way different types of unconscious influences and explains how they work-out.

Bargh distinguishes between three major forms of unconscious influences on consumers’ judgements, choices and behaviour: (1) motivational — the influence driven by currently active goals; (2) preconscious — the influence of unconscious inputs that enter conscious judgements or decisions; and (3) postconscious — subsequent influences through carryover or priming effects of conscious experiences (or mental processes) that transcend from one situation to the next. Whereas the second form concerns unconscious inputs and the third entails conscious inputs, in the first form Bargh refers to the “powerful influence” of guiding active goals, whether they are invoked consciously or unconsciously.

• In subliminal presentation of stimuli, the lack of awareness of them is entangled with their weaker intensity, briefer exposure, and thereof weaker effects. These properties raise methodological difficulties in measurement; furthermore, such ‘weak stimulation’ is not typical in natural and everyday settings (but see more on the purpose of preconscious inputs below). Henceforth, Bargh proposes that: “What matters in the everyday life of human beings is not whether the event itself is perceived consciously or not (it almost always is), it is whether the person is aware of how that event affects their choices and behavior” (p.5).

Consumers like to believe that when making decisions they rely on various pieces of information collected and considered (including from their prior knowledge) and reach a decision accordingly by their own will. On many occasions they are right to claim the rationality of their own behaviour, as that is what they try their best to do. It more probably describes correctly their decision behaviour particularly in situations of higher involvement. However, consumers’ judgements, evaluations and choices may be influenced not just by the information they voluntarily considered and factored in. Consumers may be surprised to find out (e.g., being told so) that they were influenced in those processes by various inputs, internal or external, from less expected sources — not necessarily by having certain goals or being exposed to particular sensory stimuli, for example, but due to the influence it had on their recent choices.

Unconscious influences of hidden motivations and currently active goals: Bargh refers especially to situations when consumers are not aware that a goal they hold is being currently retrieved and activated as a motivator or driver of their choice decision (e.g., an action, a brand alternative) or behaviour. Some goals arise from hidden motives. Key points made: (1) The more important the goal is to an individual, the stronger its effect is likely to be; (2) Once activated, attention will be selectively drawn to features in the environment relevant to the goal (i.e., those features receive priority); (3) The goal may also lead to changes in attitudes, evaluations and preferences if it would facilitate the goal pursuit; (4) Notably, an active goal can change decisions when it is pursued unconsciously just as when it is pursued consciously.

Bargh addresses some primary motives, including survival and safety, reproduction, hunger, cooperation with others and the need to belong (social-oriented motives). He gives examples for activations of related goals, which admittedly might cause some people to feel uncomfortable about the apparent influence of the goals (or motivators) on their decisions or behaviour (e.g., health safety: fear of virus infections can affect political attitudes (conservative vs. liberal); avoiding physical/moral disgust: a clean versus filthy courtroom and the willingness of jurors to deliberate proposed sentences versus demanding harsher sentences; hunger: feeling hungrier when leaving a big-box-store after spending a larger amount of money on non-food items).

Unconscious goal pursuit can influence decisions and behaviour in different ways in everyday life. In one of the examples brought by Bargh, recipe fliers are handed out to shoppers, or posters are hanging, in a food store; when the flier or poster included words about dieting or healthy eating, a significant reduction was found in the purchase of snack foods or inclination to try free ‘tasty but fatty” samples (in a butcher shop) (Papies et al. cited in [1]). The effect on consumer choice is often obtained through goal priming, that is, by providing consumers an advance cue in relation to the primed goal. The choice behaviour of shoppers can be influenced in this manner without them being aware of it happening, even when, as in the case above, they often cannot remember seeing the flier or poster (e.g., they may have disregarded it). However, it is important to note that such effects were exhibited in research only when the relevant goal was likely to exist personally in consumers beforehand so that it can be activated [1] — the goal (e.g., eat healthy) has to be primed by the cue, not ‘invented’.

Preconscious inputs introduced into conscious choice processes: In the early stage of perception, inputs such as sensory stimuli are usually processed preconsciously, outside our awareness of the mental analyses and transformations performed; what we consciously recognise are just their ‘products’ (e.g., faces, tables, cars, clouds in the sky). Bargh points out that: “An important quality of preconscious influences is that they are trusted as valid signals or cues about the external reality” (p., 8). Preconscious inputs gain subjective validity from being processed “effortlessly without any cognitive work on our part”, and that consequently endows them with “considerable power” to affect subsequent conscious decisions and behaviour. Even as we perceive an object, we may not truly reckon how it can influence us.

The purpose of preconscious processing of stimuli in normal or natural settings, from an evolutionary perspective, is to produce inputs (‘starting points’) for executing conscious deliberate processes, from basic adaptive functions to more advanced cognitive processes (e.g., memory, reasoning, problem solving, and decision making). Information presented in subliminal strength would also be subject to preconscious processing but the purpose of using this technique in practice is usually different: it is an intervention created for triggering a similar process; moreover, it is often intended to produce an unconscious influence that would make people feel that they have made a ‘free’ conscious choice decision while they may have been driven to it by the subliminal stimulus or information. The problem is that there is no guarantee that this procedure actually works because of its weak (obscure) initiation. Unfortunately, the whole operation suffers from some ambiguity in regard to the (initial) input, its processing, and the influence: Which is ‘preconscious’ or just ‘unconscious’?

• Consumers are probably not aware of the influence from the myriad information they encounter in everyday life on their decisions and behaviour. Consider, for example, the scenario when one is driving in an intercity road and passes below a bridge carrying an ad poster above his head, or an ad billboard to the side of the road, for a burger restaurant. The driver, say Paul, may notice the image of a sizzling burger and message of the ad for a flash of 2-3 seconds and apparently forget about it. But was it really ignored? Later, when Paul arrives to a service station, he feels an appetite for lunch and on seeing a restaurant nearby enters to have a meal, perhaps even ordering a hamburger.

Bargh [1] provides a number of examples in this category of preconscious inputs that enter and influence conscious judgements and choices. For instance, the sensory experience of physical warmth (or chill) may translate unconsciously into warm (or cold) social attitude or action towards another person. Another source of influence can come from faces, such as the attractiveness (beauty) of a face or facial features and expressions from which one may infer personality traits of the other person. However, the influence works through preconscious processing, while the perceiver attributes his or her impression or decision regarding the other person to factors in focus that seem more directly relevant to the situation or task (e.g., interview performance of a job applicant, the assistance received from a store seller). Although we may remain unaware of some of the input aspects that influence a decision, we may yet feel quite sure that we made a conscious and free decision based on those aspects that were apparent to us.

Postconscious effects: In occasions when these effects occur, people are aware of any preceding event, experience, information, or thoughts and feelings, but they are left unconscious of their plausible influence on judgements, decisions or behaviour in a subsequent event or situation. It can happen when the situations and their contexts are different, so that we do not see the relevance of the preceding situation to the next focal situation or cannot make the connection between them consciously. Bargh illustrates how different or seemingly unrelated the situations can actually be, that makes it indeed more difficult to realise the potential effect or influence occurring in the current situation or event.

The process can be explained by carry-over of a mental representation produced in a ‘base’ situation (e.g., following arousal or excitation) — the activation of the mental representation, like arousal, also involves physiological and biochemical processes, and it takes some time to dissipate, thereby it can extend into the current (‘target’) situation. As to why this escapes our recognition, Bargh explains that “we tend to interpret these internal states entirely in terms of our present circumstance, not appreciating the effect or recent experiences carrying over to our present situation” ([1], p. 10). The consequence of those carry-over effects may appear in a form of priming or implicit memory phenomena. Below are four examples of potential influence from postconscious effects (the first three adopted from Bargh [1]):

• The weather on a particular day, warm or cold, can affect the attitude expressed on climate change and global warming (concern vs. denial of the problem, respectively).
• Anticipation of the requirement to be quiet in the university library induces visitors to start talking quietly already as they approach their destination (it is kind of a ‘reverse order’ effect in which the mental representation of the destination was active and on the minds of participants in a study before they were actually in the library, Aarts & Dijksterhuis cited in [1]).
• In behavioural priming, an effect of social nature, we act upon the perceived behaviour of other people around us (e.g., parents, friends, work peers). That is, perceiving the behaviour of the other person immediately increases the likelihood of doing the same (e.g., smile back). This imitation or mimicry effect applies especially to physical actions but is not limited to them (e.g., rude discourse on social media, generosity and cooperation).
• The following example is adopted from Kahneman et al. (in their book ‘Noise’, given originally with respect to conclusion biases). It demonstrates an anchoring effect: Participants in a study are asked to write down the last two digits of their Social Security (SC) number and then say whether they would pay that amount ($US) as the price for a bottle of wine. Subsequently, however, they are asked to tell what maximum price they would be willing to pay for the wine — in one study of this type, participants whose SC number generated a high anchor price (above $80) stated a maximum price that is three times higher than those with a low anchor (below $20) [2]. One would not expect such an arbitrary clue for price to influence (unconsciously) how much a consumer is willing to pay as a maximum price for a bottle of wine.

Unconscious influences of the three forms described above may occur naturally in the normal course of our daily lives. Yet, they may also occur through deliberate attempts to persuade or induce consumers to choose and behave in a desirable manner — the question is desirable for whom? Government and non-profit agencies may use techniques of persuasion, nudging and priming, in aim to direct or induce consumers to act and choose in a way the agency believes is better off for the consumers (e.g., savings, health insurance or vaccination, protect nature). Advertisers and marketers have been smart to use compatible techniques for producing unconscious influences to persuade and induce consumers to choose and behave in a way that often might be suspected to be more desirable for the companies and brands than for the consumers (e.g., brand placement in films, increase consumption, upgrade products and services, receive billing by e-mail).

Unconscious influences invoked intentionally are achieved through interventions, using techniques and tools that would trigger the relevant mental (cognitive) processes in consumers’ minds, while engaging their own mental representations, motives and goals. Bargh [1] discusses the need for responsible and ethical employment (e.g., understand and respect human cognitive vulnerabilities, avoid aversive exploitation) by either public or business organisations. Nevertheless, he also advises consumers to acknowledge the prevalence of potential unconscious influences evoked through priming cues, stimuli and information in the external environment (especially where they can be produced intentionally) — in order not to be “run” by them, consumers need to be alert, refer to their own dominant active goals when they conflict with behavioural impulses to inhibit the latter: “Take that ability and the person does indeed become a pawn in the hands of the external environment” ([1], p. 12).

John Bargh opens for us the doors to the world of unconscious influences as he elucidates how three different forms of them may operate in consumers’ minds. Some of the examples of the influences described seem harder to believe that they can happen, and furthermore to accept; they are likely to get reactions such as ‘this can’t happen to me’, especially if the influence was produced by intentional priming. Some types of unconscious influences and the stimuli that led to them receive stronger support in research; the preconscious influences seem more difficult to comprehend and ‘swallow’ and raise more doubts. However, consumers have to acknowledge those potential influences, when and how they may occur, lest “self-interested outside parties will continue to exploit” any ignorance and denial of such influences as long as the consumers let them.

Ron Ventura, Ph.D. (Marketing)

References:

[1] The Hidden Life of the Consumer Mind; John A. Bargh, 2022; Consumer Psychology Review, 5, pp. 3-18

[2] Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment (Chapter 13: Heuristics, Biases, and Noise, see p. 170); Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Siboni, & Cass R. Sunstein, 2021; Publisher William Collins (Note: Sunstein is also the co-author of the book Nudge with Richard H. Thaler in 2008).