Wait, so if I buy that..it won't actually do that?! Implicit memory & advertising. A guest post by Sal Schiano.

      In this week’s class sessions we learned about short term and long term memory. Short term memory lasts for 15-30 seconds and has the capacity for 4-9 items. Basically everything after that is long term memory (or forgotten). Long term memory can be broken down into two forms, explicit memory (or conscious) and implicit memory (or not conscious).  Explicit memory is memory you are aware of and can voluntarily report the contents of. Implicit memory is memory you are not aware of and cannot voluntarily report the contents of. What fascinates me more is implicit memory. The fact that we can have a skill without being able to explain how we learned it or that we are able to do something without thinking is so interesting.

     Large companies have already tapped into this knowledge just as our representatives in congress have. What they do is use the information about implicit memory such as priming, as well as procedural and classical conditioning, to influence our consumerism decisions and our voter decisions. Companies pay for air, television, billboard, internet, etc. to advertise their product. This is similar to politicians paying for advertising time during election season to promote themselves.

     What companies do in these advertisements is not weigh the costs and benefits of you purchasing their product and how it will affect your bank account (though in some cases they may), but what they are actually doing is presenting their product with a certain stimulus to condition us into thinking that their product causes that stimulus or vice versa. They want us to believe in a relationship that they are presenting.

     There are many examples of this everyday but one stands out, the “Axe deodorant” advertising campaign. If men use their product they will more easily attract female mates.

      Now, what they want to have you thinking is that (↑) will happen to you if you wear the axe product, and it works. While fascinatingly enough revealing little to nothing about the quality, content or even price of their product.

      Similar to companies, political campaigns have made use of our brains doing most of the work for them. For example during the 2004 campaign for president between John Kerry and George W. Bush, GW mentioned terrorism at almost every chance he had. The reason for this was to get voters to associate fighting terrorism with George W. Bush and when this is conducted to a mass of people who ultimately know nothing about the facts of current affairs or the history and actual decisions of policy makers, it is very effective.

      Advertising also makes use of the propaganda effect, the effect that we are more likely to rate statements that we’ve read or heard before as being true, because we have been exposed to them. So for example: when Coors Light advertises their beer as being the “coldest” with mountains on them that turn blue when they’re cold- eventually after hearing this so much we are more likely to believe that Coors has the coldest beer, even though rationally this makes no sense because your beer is only as cold as you allow it to be (or as strong as your refrigerator is). We come to believe what they tell us and we are not even aware of it - that is the magic of implicit memory.