Hidden Messages

Overview

Objectives/Goals My goal is to find out if subliminal messages can effect a person's choice and does it affect gender. Methods/Materials For my expeiment, I needed 50 flash cards, M&M's, a bowl, and pictures. First, I placed 50 pictures cut out of magazines randomly, and glued them on to 50 flash cards. I made two groups of people both containing 14 people(7 girls, 7 boys). One group(group A) of people looked at 25 flash cards with a hidden message. The hidden message was the word "blue". After showing them the cards, they were each instucted to pick 2 M&M's out of five different colors(2 green,2 yellow, 2 blue, 2 orange, and 2 red). Seeing the word "blue" would want to make them pick more blue M&M's. The other group(group B) did the same thing, except they saw 25 flash cards with no hidden message. If the group who saw the hidden message picked more blue M&M's than the other group, it would prove my hypothesis. To see if it differs by gender I compared the boys and girls in group A Results Group A picked 17 Blue, 7 red, 2 yellow, 0 green, and 2 orange M&M's out of 28 possibilities. Group B picked 11 blue, 7 orange, 4 green, 3 yellow, and 3 red M&M's out of 28 possibilities. In goup A, the ratio of boys to girls who picked blue M&M's was 8:9. Conclusions/Discussion I've discovered that subliminal messages do have an effect on a person's choice. Even though the girls had higher number than the boy's by one, it is not a big enough of a difference to say that subliminal messages affect gender.

Competition history

• CSEF 2004 Behavioral Sciences · Entry J0321

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

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