James McDonald Vicary (April 30, 1915 – November 7, 1977) was an American market researcher who started the idea of subliminal advertising with an experiment in 1957. This experiment was later found to be fake. Vicary could not repeat the results of his experiments. In 1962, Vicary admitted that his subliminal "experiment" was made up to draw attention to his struggling marketing business.

Biography

James Vicary was born in Detroit and studied at the University of Michigan, where he earned his degree in 1940. He helped start the use of eye-blink analysis to learn about people's emotional tension when they saw different things. He also studied how people make quick buying decisions and how words are connected in the mind.

As a child, he loved snakes and was called "Detroit's youngest snake charmer" by The Detroit News.

In 1957, Vicary became famous for a study he claimed showed that flashing very short advertisements for Coca-Cola and popcorn during movies increased sales. Because of his claims, the CIA created a report in 1958 titled The operational potential of subliminal perception, which led to a ban on subliminal messages in the United States. The report stated, "Certain individuals can at certain times and under certain circumstances be influenced to act abnormally without awareness of the influence."

When asked to repeat the study later, Vicary could not prove his results were real. He said he could not share details about the study because it was part of a secret patent. In 1992, a researcher named Stuart Rogers talked to people from the theater where the experiment supposedly happened. The theater manager said no such test had ever taken place. In a 1962 television interview with Fred Danzig for Advertising Age, Vicary admitted the study was "a gimmick" and said the data collected was "too small to be meaningful." After this, he avoided talking to the media. Many articles about this event have been written since 1957.

Vicary's papers are kept at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center at the University of Connecticut in Storrs.

Popcorn experiment

One of the most well-known examples of subliminal messaging is the experiment claimed by James Vicary in 1957, allegedly conducted in Fort Lee, New Jersey. In a press release, Vicary stated that 45,699 people saw subliminal images in a movie theater that displayed the messages "Eat Popcorn" and "Drink Coca-Cola." He reported that this caused a 57.5 percent increase in popcorn sales and an 18.1 percent increase in Coca-Cola sales. Vicary did not explain how his results occurred, so others could not repeat his experiment. Later evidence showed that the experiment never took place, and Vicary’s results are now considered false. Vicary later admitted his claims were incorrect during a television interview, but his original statements spread quickly, leading many people to believe that subliminal messages can influence behavior.

Publications

• "How Psychiatric Methods Can Be Used in Market Research," Printers' Ink, vol. 235, no. 6, May 11, 1951, pp. 39–48.
• "Seasonal Psychology," Journal of Marketing, April 1956.
• "The Circular Test for Bias in Personal Interview Surveys," Public Opinion Quarterly, vol. 19, no. 2, Summer 1955, pp. 215–218.