When the washing machine came to a stop, Bonnie discovered that she had not brought enough money for the drier, and besides, the afternoon had disappeared and the launderette would be closing soon. She pulled her wet washing out of the machine into her Bag for Life and lugged it home. She draped her damp laundry over the washing line in the yard, and it hung there in the early evening shadows and in the dusk, barely drying at all, while Bonnie flicked between BBC channels, wondering which of the nine o’clock programmes was the right one.
17
My subjects knew me as Dr Slythe. I had put an advertisement in the local paper, and a reasonable number of people had responded. I hired an upstairs room in a community centre on Waterside Close. The room was not one of those windowless boxes: it had a large window, which I opened, and I pinned a welcoming notice onto the door. I set up a television and a video player and put out a row of chairs for the participants. It was going to be, I thought, a little bit like one of those theatre shows where you think you’re just in the audience but then, unexpectedly, you have become part of the performance, sometimes without even leaving your seat. The houselights go up and that’s the signal, like the light which comes on before the meat powder is delivered into the dog’s dish in Pavlov’s experiment, or like the tone which the dog hears prior to receiving a shock in Rescorla’s investigations, or in Maier and Seligman’s experiments, which showed that dogs which have been taught through conditioning that they have no control over receiving shocks will, in the second stage of the experiment, when they do have a choice, make no attempt to avoid the shock.
I dressed the part, in a suit, navy blue, and I also had a white laboratory coat to wear, which I had borrowed from the university prior to being asked to leave.
My subjects were split up into three groups, each of which was to be shown a video which I had put together in the editing suite. Nowadays, there is dedicated software: I could do it on my laptop at home.
I was planning on testing the power of subliminal messaging, not by flashing up the name of a branded drink or even an exhortation to drink this particular branded drink. It seemed to me that the success of such an experiment would be hard to quantify: a participant who, after seeing the video, chose that particular branded drink, might have chosen it anyway, regardless of the subliminal message. It seemed much more reasonable to assume that nobody coming into the room that day was planning on jumping out of the window.
More specifically, I was aiming to establish which was the more effective: negative suggestion or positive command. I had, in the editing suite, put together three videos. Superficially, they were all the same, a montage of various everyday images.
My morning cohort, Group A, included Mrs Falls. She’d had to bring along her daughter, who was seven years old at the time. The little girl sat on the floor at the back of the room with a drawing pad and some felt-tip pens and a packet of sweets to keep her quiet. “Don’t draw on the floor, Bonnie,” said Mrs Falls to the little girl, who had not yet uncapped a pen. The little girl looked at the floor, whose vinyl tiles were about the same size and shape as the sheets of paper in her drawing pad, and she took the lid off a pen. I seated my participants so that they were facing both the television screen and, beyond it, the window, which was open, I said, so that the room would not be stifling. I explained to them that I was studying attention span and memory, and that they were required to watch very closely the video which I was about to show to them, and that afterwards there would be a task and questions. And so, they watched very closely a video in which I had planted messages which appeared on the screen for a matter of milliseconds. For Group A, in amongst landscape and cityscape and seashore shots, there were positive commands: “FAIL”, in capitals in white on black and in black on white, and “JUMP”, superimposed on edges, ledges, open windows. (“Fail” is both a positive command and a negative word. In a 2009 article, “Subliminal advertising really does work, claim scientists”, the Telegraph reported that subjects who were shown negative, neutral and positive subliminal words were more likely to pick up, subconsciously, on the negative ones, such as “despair”, and “murder”.) When the video came to an end, I realised that I had forgotten to put on my white laboratory coat. I put it on and then asked the participants to take a buzz-wire test. There was a reasonable success rate on the buzz-wire test, which was a disappointment. Mrs Falls managed it: she had a very steady hand. I then asked a series of questions about the video which the group had been shown, keeping them there for longer than I had planned to, but not a single person showed the slightest interest in the open window. I was not, of course, planning on letting anyone actually jump out of the window, but the urge to do so would nonetheless have been evident. I had argued with the university many times about such subtleties.
In between my first two groups, I ate a sandwich. It was during this break that I realised that I had inadvertently watched the first video alongside Group A: I too had been exposed to the “FAIL” and “JUMP” commands. It felt like having stood in the path of an X-ray, an invisible beam of electromagnetic radiation, without having first put on the lead apron. Or perhaps, I thought, the video would not work on me, if I knew that the subliminal messages were there.
I tidied the room up and noticed that the drawing pad had been left behind. On the front, in untidy handwriting, it said “Bonnie Susan Falls”, and inside she had drawn a series of rectangles.
After lunch, I welcomed Group B, to whom I showed the same film, except that their subliminal messages were negative suggestions: “DON’T FAIL”, in black and white, and “DON’T JUMP”, printed like public notices in front of those open windows and at those cliff edges. I watched it with them, hoping that it might neutralise any effect from the first video, that a positive command and a negative command might cancel each other out. Afterwards, they did the buzz-wire test and answered the questions and again showed not the slightest interest in the window, which I had opened a little wider before they came in.
I had hired the community centre for the whole day, but by the afternoon I was running late. I ought to have hired it for two days, or three, but that would have been more expensive. Also, by the middle of the afternoon, I was out of temper because my experiment was not going as I had hoped. I rushed the control group, who were to watch a version of the video which had no subliminal messages in it. I asked them only a few questions before paying them and sending them home. When I was packing up, I discovered that undoctored version of the video still in my bag, which meant that my “control” group must in fact have seen one of the other videos. Probably, I had accidentally reinserted the version that I had shown to Group A, or perhaps I had neglected to swap the tape at all after the Group B showing. Either way, this meant that I had no control group. But never mind, I thought: the experiment had failed anyway. Slight differences between the groups’ buzz-wire tests were statistically insignificant, and not one of my subjects had even approached the open window. One woman, who at one point I thought was about to, was only fetching her purse from her bag, so as to show another woman a photograph of her new granddaughter. “Oh,” said the other woman, looking at the baby’s picture. “She’s going to be a heartbreaker.”
I typed up my notes, but I was, to be honest, rather put out.
Then, after the passage of some 20 years, I read in the local newspaper about a man who had jumped or fallen from the roof of a car park, and I recognised his name: Eliot Pierce. I dug out my records of my subjects’ names, groupings, test scores, and I found that this man had been in Group C: he had been the youngest member of my control group. I remembered that he had worn glasses, and that the lenses were dirty, smudged: he walked around with a big thumbprint — presumably his own, but possibly somebody else’s — between him and the world. I had wondered whether his glasses would have prevented him from seeing the video properly, whether everything would have looked blurry, but I suppose not.