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They are trying to sell burgers in this commercial, therefore the neutral stimulus is the burgers. Their unconditioned stimuli are Lebanon James, Dwight Howard, and Larry Bird because when you see them, you associate them to be champions or winners, so the unconditioned response is “being a champion. ” When you see them fighting over the big Mac you think that McDonald’s (the conditioned stimulus) is winners’ fuel, which after watching all the ads over and over, the conditioned response is “being a winner. Sacs, the psychology study, demonstrate that sometimes people conforms o the responses of a unanimous majority even when this majority seems to be wrong. For this study Sacs showed groups of people two cards, one of them had a line, called standard line, and the other card had 3 more lines then the participants had to select which line of the second card was the same height of the line in the first card. The majority of members of each group were confederates and had to answer wrong to see how the minority would answer.
Sacs found out that about 30% of the minority conformed to the majority, conformity was strongest when the majority made a unanimous decision. Sacs conformity studies have been repeated with a variety of variables all around the world over the past half century but the results have been inconsistent across studies. One of the causes of this inconsistent could be the use of confederates, even though confederates use is psychological science is very popular using them has its disadvantages like sometimes the way they behave is unnatural and artificial ways.
For this reason Moor and Aria decided to reply Sacs experiment without the use of confederates, they used one hundred and four Japanese undergraduates, forty men and sixty four woman, unlike Sacs they also use Oman to add a gender variable and they used a little computer trick and magenta and green sunglasses. In the trials the top parts of the standard lines were either green or magenta so that the majority and minority would see them different because of the sunglasses.
The presentation trick worked and based on the answers on a questionnaire after the experiment the both majority and minority notice that the people answered differently than them, but they did not notice the presentation trick. The results found on this experiment clearly showed that the minority of woman erred more because they conformed to the majority. On the other side the participants were 3. 44 and the average in Sacs original experiment were 4. 41, but there is something weird here Sacs only use men in his experiment and men in this experiment erred in an average of 0. 6 even less than other responders.
There are a lot of reasons that can explain the differences (Culture, gender, difficulty of the tasks etc. ) the authors explain that the most probable one were the interpersonal relations. In ash experiment the majority and minority were practically strangers while in this experiment they were acquainted with each other. Hodges and Greyer explain that conformity errors would be less among friends than among strangers. This experiment is directly related to social psychology. We usually conform to what everybody else want to do, or because he did it I have to do it or because he said it I have to say it too.
We humans tent to behave as other people behave and that was exactly what came up on the results of the experiment. How some people Just conform to what some say and assimilate as a fact. This experiment also relate to thinking and the thinking process like with the Sacs experiment, if we do not know en of the answers or are not sure about we tend to conform to what the most people said or if you think it is the right answer but people say otherwise they make you doubt of your own Judgment even though you know you are right.
I also think that this experiment could be related to learned helplessness. If you think you are not good at doing a line discrimination or something like that you are not even going to try to give and answer for yourself you will Just conform to what the others said. We are also very influenced by or culture so I think the results may vary in different entries according to our social values.
I learned lot of things by doing this assignment like how we tend to conform to what other people say, and since then I have been trying to pay attention when I interact with people and I realize I do conform a lot of times. I also learned how the process of thinking works and how we solve a problem, I learned some conditions that reduce or increase conformity from Sacs experiment and also from Moor and Oral. I learned that we behave as others in a group because we want to avoid rejection and want to gain some social approval because most of us do not enjoy being alone.