Effects of Subliminal Conditioning
on Computer Program Users
by Hyemin Chung

Introduction | Experiment Design | Results & Discussions | Conclusions | Reference


Backgrounds and Hypothesis
People can be affected by even what they cannot recognize.

There have been many studies that subliminal affective conditioning, which cannot be recognized by people because they are exposed for too short duration, can affect people's behavior or evaluation.
Several research showed that after unconsciously exposed to A, people choose A rather than B when they are forced to choose one between them.[greenwald, 1992] Also, people with positive subliminal conditioning give higher score than people with negative subliminal conditioning in evaluating something.[Winikielman, 1997] Even, people's behaviors such as drinking and consuming are affected by subliminal affective conditioning.[Winkielman, 2005]

Then, it might be possible using subliminal conditioning to improve human-computer relationship. If we can use the subliminal conditioning to make computer programs more favorable, it could be used in many softwares to improve working environments or education environments in which computer programs are used a lot.

Thus, my hypothesis is that,
1. Subliminal affective conditioning in computer programs might change the users' responses to the programs.
2. Positive conditioning might make the programs more favorable, and negative conditioning might make the programs more unlikable.


This study is different from traditional studies in two ways.

At first, traditional studies about subliminal affective conditioning were limited in the specific targets or behaviors in the experiment. Thus, there were few evidences about how subjects were feeling while spending time for the experiment. How much they were satisfied, how much they enjoyed, how much they fill excited or bored during the experiment, and how much they were willing to spend more time with it.
However, this experiment will study about subjects' responses or satisfaction to whole experiment system itself, which is a computer program.

And, traditional studies did not try to apply this phenomenon to human-computer interactions area. This study will try the possibility of using subliminal conditioning to improve human-computer interactions.