“Subliminal Sorcery” Pratkanis and Aronson Reading Response The authors did not use any humor in the article. To establish their credibility the authors list many reasons and examples as to why their argument is true. The authors use rational appeals to support their argument, although they mention that subliminal messages work when you want them to, or believe them to be true. I believe Pratkanis’ and Aronson’s argument that subliminal messaging does not work. I believe some subliminal perception is possible, such as our notice of our name being said in a large crowd, but only minor cognitive processing. I do not feel that flashing short statements or words on a screen, or backwards messages in tapes have any influence on our thoughts or actions. I feel that subliminal messaging only works because of expectations. Subliminal messaging only works if you want it to work, like hypnosis at a circus or even the placebo effect. You open your mind and want hypnosis or subliminal messaging to work so it does. The amount that the process affects you is dependent on how high your expectations are, or how much you want it to work. If you do not believe it works then it has no effect on you. The experiments done by the authors had the components that the other experiments that were criticized did not have. The experiment was repeated and had a control group. It is nice to know that subliminal messaging does not work, and that we just have to worry about explicit messaging