Even through all of my high school and college course on psychology, I can credit “The Office” with my favorite example of classical conditioning. Jim Helpart, in his series long quest to annoy Dwight as much as possible, classically conditions him to crave a mint every time he hears the error noise on a computer. 

The pure prank genius in the scheme was when Jim would make the noise on the computer, and then not offer Dwight a mint, leaving him with an unpleasant taste in his mouth. This 30 second sketch is the perfect example of classical conditioning. There is a stimulus (the computer sound) that is constantly paired with a second stimulus (the mint). This is repeated until the second stimulus is automatically associated with the first. The ultimate goal is that after enough of this pairing, the first stimulus could be presented and will elicit the same response even without the introduction of the second stimulus.

A second and more recent example of this is poor Bucky in Captain America. His brainwashing is another great example of classical conditioning. Because let’s face it, who would ever hurt Chris Evans if it weren’t for the evil HYDRA forcing you to? Here’s a great breakdown of the psychological forces afoot in that movie: http://cloakedsparrow.tumblr.com/post/139708799305/lets-talk-about-buckys-brain

And to end with, classical conditioning has even gotten cool in the t-shirt world. Here’s a shirt from one of my favorite websites, MentalFloss: