In previous anchoring studies people were asked to consider an anchor as a possible answer to the target question or were given informative anchors. The authors predicted that basic anchoring effects can occur, whereby uninformative numerical anchors influence a judgment even when people are not asked to compare this number to the target value. Five studies supported these hypotheses: Basic anchoring occurs if people pay sufficient attention to the anchor value; knowledgeable people are less susceptible to basic anchoring effects; anchoring appears to operate unintentionally and nonconsciously in that it is difficult to avoid even when people are forewarned. The possible mechanisms of basic anchoring and the relation between these mechanisms and other processes of judgment and correction are discussed.

Participants in 2 experiments watched a filmed story and then left the lab--with instructions not to think about the film, with instructions to think about the film, or with no instructions. Memories of the film, assessed on participants' return to the lab some 5 hr later, showed reliable effects of thought suppression on memory for the sequence of events in the film. Participants who suppressed thoughts of the film were less able to retrieve the order of events by several measures than were those in the other groups, even thought their retrieval of the events themselves as assessed by recognition, free recall, and cued recall was not generally impaired.

Lay theories about persuasive messages were expected to lead to unwanted changes in attitudes that people were trying to protect. In Study 1 , students opposed to the legalization of marijuana chose to watch either a pro-legalization speech or a pro-legalization subliminal message, with instructions to choose the tape that would influence them the least. A significant proportion of people chose the speech. Among these participants and those randomly assigned to watch the tapes, however, the speech caused significant attitude change in a pro-legalization direction whereas the subliminal messages did not. Studies 2-4 showed that people were generally unwilling to change their attitudes, that they mistakenly believed they could generate effective counterarguments against the pro-legalization speech, and that even after watching the speech they underestimated the degree that their attitudes had changed. The implications of these findings for the effects of advertising are discussed.In the late 1950s, James Vicary claimed that he had increased concession sales by inserting subliminal messages into a commercial film. He sup posedly flashed the phrases, "Drink Coke" and "Eat Popcorn" at speeds too quick to be consciously perceived and these messages reportedly led to a dramatic increase in sales of soda and popcorn. Despite the debunk ing of this and other claims about subliminal advertising (Moore, 1982;Weir, 1984), there is a widespread belief among the public that such techniques are both common and powerful. Wilson, Brekke, Etling, and Houston (1992), for example, found that nearly 80% of a sample of college students preferred not to receive a subliminal message because they were afraid the message might influence them in an undesirable

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