Since the days of Key and Cantril and Murray, fMRI and ingenious experiments by cognitive psychologists /behavioral economists like Daniel Kahneman, Dan Ariely and many others have confirmed in a multitude of ways that habits, hunches, and conditioned responses is responsible for almost all non-formal human decision making.
Even complex, procedural logic-driven human decision-making has an intuitive component, which anyone involved with the advertising, market research or media content production knows. For this reason, tactics and technologies which reliably influence the unconscious component of mind are highly developed. National, regional and local media are freighted with sounds, symbols and images, unperceived messages targeting consumers' unconscious, to be retained and held in memory to influence future decision-making.
Professor Wilson Bryan Key put it, “In spite of the evidence presented in this book, most Americans will still find it difficult to believe that their trusted, high-credibility information sources long ago betrayed them into the hands of profit hungry marketing executives who have quietly researched, developed and exhaustively applied a subliminal technology of communication that is now driving every larger segments of the population to pathological behaviors. “
Subliminal and subsonic influence tactics are seldom discussed in MSM media, not because the tactics are ineffective and rarely used, but because they are so effective that the advertising-supported media superorganism considers them critical to the function of the industry. Subliminal advertising is illegal, though the laws against it are both feeble and likely unenforceable, having been openly transgressed for the entire term of their existence; and, since the business model of advertising supported media depends on their nullity.
The manipulation of individuals, identity groups and national populations after world war 2 was held critical to “national security;” subliminals are key to that manipulation. Advertising and media content targeting viewer’s unconscious mind has been augmented by techniques like hypnotic induction, subsonic “whisper” acoustics and images which stimulate aggression, sexual arousal or instinctual response. As previously noted, the power of these exploits, their depth of penetration and range of their reach has been greatly enhanced by the advent of networked media technologies.