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Updated: Jul 21, 2025

Post-Movie Subliminal Measurement PMSM, for Investigating Implicit Social Bias
Published on: February 29, 2020
Implicit bias training can remove bias from subliminal stimuli, restoring choice divergence: A proof-of-concept study
Roger Koenig-Robert1, Hashim El Omar1, Joel Pearson1
1Future Minds Lab, School of Psychology, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.
Abstract:
Subliminal information can influence our conscious life. Subliminal stimuli can influence cognitive tasks, while endogenous subliminal neural information can sway decisions before volition. Are decisions inextricably biased towards subliminal information? Or can they diverge away from subliminal biases via training? We report that implicit bias training can remove biases from subliminal sensory primes. We first show that subliminal stimuli biased an imagery-content decision task. Participants (n = 17) had to choose one of two different patterns to subsequently imagine. Subliminal primes significantly biased decisions towards imagining the primed option. Then, we trained participants (n = 7) to choose the non-primed option, via post choice feedback. This training was successful despite participants being unaware of the purpose or structure of the reward schedule. This implicit bias training persisted up to one week later. Our proof-of-concept study indicates that decisions might not always have to be biased towards non-conscious information, but instead can diverge from subliminal primes through training.
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