STROOP EFFECT

STROOP 2

The Stroop Effect

Thirty years after John Ridley Stroop’s famous experiment in 1935, researchers became fascinated by its effect. Thanks to Klein in 1964, who found that interference of naming was much stronger for closely related words, Stroop’s study finally gained interest from researchers. There has been well over a half century of similar studies, with consistent findings on similar experiments. (MacLeod, 1991) Many believe Stroop’s study was a landmark, or as MacLeod (1992) calls it, “The Gold Standard” for attentional research. In his original study, Stroop found that naming the color ink of a word was interfered by automatic reading of the word. For example, printed in yellow ink, was the word green. When instructed to say the color of ink aloud, participants struggled not to say “green”. (MacLeod, 1992)

Stroop’s idea stemmed from a philosophical idea that was first used in psychology by James McKeen Cattel in 1886. Cattel reported that naming an object or an object’s qualities aloud took longer than reading a word. Stroop decided to take the idea further (MacLeod, 1992)

For this particular study, a brief experiment was performed to test the Stroop effect. Two word lists were used which will be referred to as “List Compatible” and “List Incompatible”. It was hypothesized that when naming colors aloud on List Compatible, participants will take less time, than when they name the colors on List Incompatible.

Method

Participants

Participants in this study were students enrolled in an introductory psychology research class. This test sample was largely Caucasian. Of the 18 studen...

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...stead of recognition of color, is so powerful that it cannot be avoided.

However, an experiment performed by coloring only one letter in the word completely eliminated the Stoop Effect. (Besner, Stolz & Boutilier, 1997). These researchers argue that automatic reading is a myth because reading of words did not interfere with naming of colors. Perhaps attention focus can override automatic reading if the target is smaller. I do not believe automaticity can be dismissed as myth on the single experiment alone.

In the future, words could be highlighted with inconsistent colors to see if the results differ from past studies. Many variations must be tested in order to dismiss automaticity.

In conclusion, the experiment preformed was congruent with the hypothesis that naming the color of font from words on List Compatible was faster than List Incompatible.