The Stroop Effect: Why It Works

The Stroop Effect was created by John Ridley Stroop, and is a very important discovery even today. The Effect itself is the interference between two different colors, and the test is also as such.

During the Stroop test, subjects are asked to read lists of colors (blue green purple etc.). But instead of the colors being in black ink, they are in different color ink, and that is the color that the subject says, not the one written. So there might be a yellow blue, or a red green, and in that case if I was taking the test I would say: yellow, red.

People find this difficult at some levels, and these levels help different types of doctors to diagnose you. This research has also been incorporated into other experimental psychological studies. That was the type of testing that I did.

When I sat down at my desk, staring at the black computer screen in front of me, I thought to myself that I would like to research something that isn’t concrete. Something that I wouldn’t know the answer to already. I was searching around the web and I came by a Stroop test, and I tried it. I was interested right away, so I had to keep on going with it. I researched more and discovered a long paper on it which I read. To my pleasure there was something that no one had found out about it, and that is why it works for sure. I decided to put in my two cents on the matter.

Again, I was drawing a blank. How could I test this theory? All I had was this one test, and all that would tell me is that it would work. Then I realized that I would have to come up with a multitude of tests to get to my thesis. So I created the Reverse Association, which was words that didn’t have to do with colors but were still related to each other, like cow, milk, farm, etc., and the scramble test, which started out as colors scrambled to see if people understood the writing, but evolved into just the speed of color naming test.

I tested 13 people with the original, the Reverse Association, and the Scramble tests, and when I calculated the results, it was shocking how it came out. My original hypothesis was that it would be the direct interference between the color words, and the color itself, and after my tests I had confirmed that it is halfway between this direct interference, and the interference between the different brain processes of seeing and naming colors, and reading the text of anything.