Subliminal influences of emotions in the paradigm of voluntary submission.

Summary Our thesis is situated at the intersection of work on subliminal priming and work on the classic techniques of submission without pressure: the foot-in-the-door (PDLP, Freedman & Fraser, 1966) and the nose-gate (PAN, Cialdini et al. , 1975). Work on subliminal priming shows that an individual can be influenced in his or her judgments, attitudes, behaviors and even memories by a stimulus without even being aware of it. Work on the PDLP (for review: Burger, 1999) shows that the acceptance of a less costly request (preparatory act) predisposes the subject to accept a more costly request (target request) later on. The work on the NAP shows that refusing a very expensive first query increases the probability of accepting the target query. First, we combined the subliminal priming paradigm with the PDLP in a 4 (positive priming, negative priming, neutral priming, and no priming) x 2 design (with preparatory act vs. without preparatory act) to test their joint effects on volunteering behavior for a road safety prevention association. Our results showed that the effect classically observed with this procedure of voluntary submission (SLC, Joule & Beauvois, 1998) was accentuated when the subjects had been subjected to a subliminal priming inducing a negative emotion. In a second step, we wanted to reproduce this original result in a new experiment with the introduction of a new dependent variable: memorization. In accordance with our expectations, without preparatory act and with negative priming, subjects agreed to give less time to the association. With preparatory act, on the other hand, priming with a positive emotion facilitates recognition. In a third step, we conducted another experiment to see if the same pattern of results was obtained with another SLC procedure based on an inverse principle: the NAP. Using the same experimental design and the same priming procedure, the results showed, as expected, that with a positive priming in the PAN condition, subjects accept to give more time to association compared to the other conditions. Also as expected, with negative priming subjects agreed to give less time to association. The same pattern of results was also observed with the introduction in a fourth time of the variable memorization. The same applies to the PAN effect as to the PDLP effect: the induction of a positive emotion potentiates it while the induction of a negative emotion hinders it. The results of our thesis provided an empirical demonstration that the subliminal priming effects of emotions persist for a few minutes (about 8 minutes) following the subjects' first exposure to subliminal primers and that the social influence behavior produced is not directly associated with these stimuli.