Course brings cognition to bear in cutting through advertisements’ spin

In “Language, Truth and Advertising,” Julie Sedivy offers Brown students the tools to decipher the information they see and hear, and reasons they should want to do so.

by Kristen Cole

Reading this article will make you happy, sexy and thin.

While this claim is obviously not true – sorry, reading this won’t do any of the above – it is not always as easy to determine the veracity of assertions made or implied by advertisers hawking products on television, the Internet and in magazines.

In her undergraduate course “Language, Truth and Advertising,” Julie Sedivy, assistant professor of cognitive and linguistic sciences, offers Brown students the tools to decipher the information they see and hear, and reasons they should want to do so.

“A background in language processing allows you to have a detachment and a way of evaluating the devices used by advertisers,” said Sedivy, who has researched how humans assign meaning to words and phrases. “Part of the desire to teach the course was to equip students with the intellectual tools to interact with ads while protecting their own interests.”

Fundamental questions about the impact of advertising are at the center of attempts to legislate that form of communication, and frequently involve issues surrounding how we perceive meaning, how we remember asserted versus implied meanings, and the linguistic and cognitive limitations of children to evaluate assertions, according to Sedivy.

In some countries, such as Canada and Sweden, advertisers are prohibited from targeting ads to children younger than 13. In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) regulates deceptive advertising and the legal definition of “truth.”

Scientific research has attempted to determine whether there are clear links between ads and actions. Questions include whether there is a relationship between childhood obesity and an increase in ads for food lacking nutritional value, or eating disorders and increases in ads for beauty products.

Other studies have examined the state of mind in which we are most vulnerable to ads – in other words, when we are most apt to remember messages or be most skeptical. Using eye movements, researchers have tried to determine our attention level while viewing ads.

In her course, Sedivy discusses the range of tools used by advertisers and the range of motivations behind those tools. Those include linguistic means of targeting specific audiences by geography, class and gender, and the ways in which advertising is used during wartime.

As part of the course, students are required to employ their cognitive training to make a case for why an advertisement violates FTC criteria and what the company would argue in defense of its advertisement. One former student took it a step further, submitting a complaint to the FTC about an Internet ad for a weight loss supplement. The ad was changed, said Sedivy.

Students in Sedivy’s course often take extreme points of view – those who perceive ads as having nothing valuable to contribute to society, and those who think consumers have the ultimate responsibility to determine the truth. Sedivy’s opinion lies somewhere in the middle.

“I don’t think they’re evil,” Sedivy said, noting that ads stimulate the economy and have the potential to uncover useful information about products.

“Clearly ads are persuasive in nature. But the real question is whether there are effects that could be detrimental,” she added. “The struggle is for a society to determine and minimize the negative impact.”