Subliminal exposure to national flags affects political thought and behavior Ran R. Hassin*†, Melissa J. Ferguson‡, Daniella Shidlovski*, and Tamar Gross* *Department of Psychology, Hebrew University, Jerusalem 91905, Israel; and ‡Department of Psychology, 211 Uris Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853 Edited by Edward E. Smith, Columbia University, New York, NY, and approved October 29, 2007 (received for review May 20, 2007) Political thought and behavior play an important role in our lives, The experiments in this article examine the effects of national from ethnic tensions in Europe, to the war in Iraq and the Middle symbols, in this case one’s national flag, on various political Eastern conflict, to parliamentary and presidential elections. How- issues of the type presented above and on significant ‘‘real-life’’ ever, little is known about how the individual’s political attitudes political behavior. The national flag of any country is one of the and decisions are shaped by subtle national cues that are so most pervasive cultural and ideological images, and as such it has prevalent in our environment. We report a series of experiments the potential of exerting significant influence over our behavior. that show that subliminal exposure to one’s national flag influ- Symbols of this sort are known to have two functions. First, they ences political attitudes, intentions, and decisions, both in labora- communicate certain ideas, beliefs, and goals. Second, they bring tory settings and in ‘‘real-life’’ behavior. Furthermore, this manip- about thoughts and behaviors that are concomitant with these ulation consistently narrowed the gap between those who score ideas (17–20). Hence, given that flags are often used to express high vs. low on a scale of identification with Israeli nationalism. The unity and patriotism (21), they are likely to be able to bring about first two experiments examined participants’ stance toward the unity (22, 23). Given the vast research on nonconscious processes Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the Jewish settlers in the West Bank. succinctly described above, we argue that this effect of national Experiment 3 examined voting intentions and actual voting in flags may occur outside of conscious awareness (22). Israel’s recently held general elections. The results portray a con- The constant changes in the degrees of citizens’ unity and sistent picture: subtle reminders of one’s nationality significantly partiality concerning national issues are central to the life of a influence political thought and overt political behavior. nation, and understanding these dynamics has long occupied both political thinkers and politicians. In principle, there are two ͉ ͉ ͉ ͉ automaticity nationalism social cognition unconscious voting possible ways to foster political unity: first, by drawing people from the center and one political extreme (e.g., left wing) to the ow should the European Union handle Iran’s nuclear direction of the other extreme (e.g., right wing); and second, by Hdevelopment? Under what circumstances should the drawing people from both extremes to the center. United States withdraw its troops from Iraq? Where should Experiment 1 examined how participants’ opinions toward Israel place the new separation wall it is unilaterally building, on critical issues in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict are affected by PSYCHOLOGY the 1967 borders or on Palestinian territory in the West Bank? the subliminal presentation of the national flag. The second These are among the most crucial topics in today’s interna- experiment examined the effects of the subliminal presentation tional politics, with ramifications stretching from the Middle of a national flag on another central and controversial political East, to the more global ‘‘war on terror,’’ to many aspects of our issue: the approach toward the Jewish settlers in the West Bank daily lives. In this article, we show that the subliminal presen- and Gaza. The experiment was conducted in the weeks that tation of national symbols can significantly influence people’s preceded Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, a point in time (August stance on issues of this type, as well as how they intend to vote, 2005) in which the role of the settlers in Israel’s history and and how they actually do vote, in general elections. More future was hotly debated. This debate emphasized the fact that specifically, in all of the experiments described below, the brief the settlers are a unique group within Israeli society, thus presentation of a national symbol pulled people toward the underlining their relative outgroupness. The third experiment political center. took the examination of the effects of nonconscious ideological There are many reasons why nonconscious exposure to na- symbols one step further, by examining voting intentions and tional symbols should not play a significant causal role in political actual voting behavior. This experiment was conducted in the thought and behavior. Chief among them is the normative week that preceded the last Israeli general elections (the elec- perspective, which suggests that one’s political agenda should be tions were held on March 28, 2006). driven by two factors: one’s ideology and the facts of the matter. In all experiments, we examine the effect of subliminal flag These should form the input for an intentional reasoning activation on Israelis who score either high or low on the process, wherein the goal is carefully thought-through political Identification With Israeli Nationalism scale (henceforth, IWIN; activity. Indeed, research in experimental psychology and re- see Methods). lated fields has repeatedly shown that political behavior and thought are influenced by one’s ideology (as manifested, for Results example, in one’s values and party affiliation) and by current Experiment 1. In this experiment, we examine how subliminal flag – events (1 3). priming and IWIN interact to affect political opinions regarding However, research in the cognitive sciences over the last three decades has repeatedly demonstrated that conscious awareness is very limited in its processing resources (4–7). This is why Author contributions: R.R.H. and M.J.F. designed research; D.S. and T.G. performed re- simple thought and routine actions are determined not solely by search; R.R.H., D.S., and T.G. analyzed data; and R.R.H. and M.J.F. wrote the paper. conscious deliberation and reasoning but also by complex cog- The authors declare no conflict of interest. nitive and motivational processes that occur outside of conscious †To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: [email protected]. awareness (8–15). These findings raise the possibility that even This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/ political thought and overt political behavior may be affected by 0704679104/DC1. nonconscious processes (16). © 2007 by The National Academy of Sciences of the USA www.pnas.org͞cgi͞doi͞10.1073͞pnas.0704679104 PNAS ͉ December 11, 2007 ͉ vol. 104 ͉ no. 50 ͉ 19757–19761 Downloaded by guest on September 23, 2021 7.00 IWIN IWIN Low 8.00 Low High High 6.00 7.00 5.00 6.00 ecnatS lacitiloP ecnatS ecnatS lacit ecnatS 4.00 5.00 iloP 3.00 4.00 2.00 3.00 1.00 2.00 control flag control flag priming priming Fig. 1. Average responses to experimental questions as a function of priming Fig. 2. Average responses to experimental questions as a function of priming and IWIN (high numbers indicate more nationalistic attitudes). and IWIN (high numbers indicate more nationalistic attitudes). the Palestinian–Israeli conflict. The results of Experiment 1 are strongly objected to it [t(22) ϭ 7.12, P Ͻ 0.001]. Priming given below. effectively brought these groups into alignment (tϽ 1). Similarly, Awareness. None of the participants indicated awareness of the low IWINs in the control condition strongly supported Israel’s subliminal prime or suspicion of any sort. More specifically, none unilateral disengagement from Gaza, whereas high IWINs ob- of the participants could report having seen the prime; they were jected to it [t(22) ϭ 6.46, P Ͻ 0.001]. Priming united these groups all convinced that there was only one stimulus before each (t Ͻ 1.1). Importantly, no effects were found for the control question (the mask); and no participant came close to guessing questions that were not related to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict the true nature of the experiment. Hence, we report the data of (all Fs Ͻ1.5). all participants. The results of the first experiment provide strong support for Last, although stimuli were presented for 16 msec and were our hypothesis. Specifically, subliminal activation of a national immediately masked, and although debriefing data revealed no symbol affected participants’ responses to questions regarding awareness of the primes (see Methods), we wanted to more key national issues. This effect was moderating in nature; the directly assess awareness of the stimuli. To do so, we ran a simple ideological gap between high and low IWINs was diminished by priming experiment (Experiment 1a) in which either the flag the nonconscious exposure to the national flag. (50%) or the control stimulus (50%) was presented for 16 msec, A complementary way of examining the effects of priming is immediately followed by a mask. Participants were explicitly by looking at the variances of the different groups. If, as we asked to indicate whether the first stimulus (i.e., the prime) had argue, priming enhances unity, then the variance in the primed been a flag or the control stimulus. The results clearly show that group should be smaller than that in the control condition. accuracy (M ϭ 0.48) did not significantly differ from chance Indeed, Levene’s test reveals this is the case (P Ͻ 0.05). [t(41) Ͻ 1.28]. In addition, although participants were con- sciously looking for flags and could earn money by finding them, Experiment 2.