Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [420]
The story was a sensation. The public was horrified, social critics issued alarms, subliminal advertising on radio and TV became big business during the 1970s, department stores played background music tapes containing undetectable warnings against shoplifting, and the Federal Communications Commission ruled that the use of subliminal messages could result in the loss of a broadcast license.
All utter nonsense. In The Age of Propaganda Pratkanis and Aronson reported on their examination of more than two hundred academic papers on subliminal messages. Most found no evidence that such messages influence behavior, and those that did were “either fatally flawed on methodological grounds or cannot be reproduced.”74
For good measure, Pratkanis and Aronson cited a droll experiment in which the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation subliminally flashed the message phone now 352 times during a popular Sunday night show, after telling viewers that a subliminal message would be sent and asking them to say what it was. The message had no effect on the volume of phone calls placed during the experiment, and not one of the nearly five hundred viewers who wrote in to say what they thought they perceived had the right answer. Many, however, apparently aware of the Vicary story, said they became hungry or thirsty during the show.75
But all who believed the Vicary story had been gulled. An article in Advertising Age in 1984 said that Vicary admitted his original experiment was a fake, intended to increase customers for his failing marketing business.76
Psychology in the Courtroom
The formidable Hugo Münsterberg was the first to recommend that psychology be applied to the justice system, the very foundation of the structure of governance. In his 1908 book On the Witness Stand, he summarized existing psychological knowledge of the factors influencing testimony and said that applied psychology would be helpful to judges, lawyers, and juries—all of whom he took to task for “thinking that their legal instinct and their common sense supply them with all that is needed, and somewhat more.”77 But the book had little effect; during the next half century psychologists rarely served as expert witnesses, they tested candidates for only a handful of big-city police departments, and the studies they conducted on the psychology of the justice system had no direct effect.
Since the 1960s, however, there has been an explosive growth of interest in and application of psychology within the justice system. Although legal professionals and psychologists continue to have a strained relationship, applied psychology now pervades the courts, judicial chambers, and probation hearing rooms. The 2005 edition of the Handbook of Forensic Psychology, edited by the psychologists Irving B. Weiner and Allen K. Hess, runs to 912 pages and contains chapters on over a score of areas of application, each involving many specific activities , in both civil and criminal actions. To name but a few of these, psychologists now:
—act as consultants to the court in custody disputes where there is a question about parental competency, and render opinions based on clinical methods of assessment.
—testify in compensation cases where an employee claims that a physical or psychological disability is the result of injuries in the workplace. Such claims, running to many billions of dollars per year, often involve malingering or fakery; the psychologist’s job is to interview and test the plaintiff, and report his or her clinical