Subliminal Flag-Waving Discourages Extreme Ideas

New Scientist ^ | 12-5-2007

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Subliminal flag-waving discourages extreme ideas

05 December 2007
From New Scientist Print Edition.

As if emotional campaign messages weren't enough, politicians now have another way to try to win over the electorate. A study in Israel shows that voters can be manipulated into changing their attitudes by being shown subliminal images of their national flag.

A team led by psychologist Ran Hassin at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem divided volunteers into two groups: those who strongly identified with Israeli nationalism and those who identified with it only weakly. They then quizzed them about their attitude to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict after showing them a brief image of an Israeli flag or a control image. The image appeared for long enough to be registered by the brain but not long enough for conscious awareness (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0704679104).

Those who had viewed the flag shifted their position towards the middle ground: both right-wingers and left-wingers became less extreme. The researchers also found that it influenced the way participants voted in national elections. Hassin says that the Israeli flag represents a sense of national unity, and that reminding people of it draws them towards that ideology. However, the psychology involved is unclear, especially since it remains uncertain whether subliminal advertising has an effect on consumers.

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