Psychology Experiment

The Stroop Effect

Myah Smith

Period 1

12/7/15

My experiment was performed by people doing the Stroop test, which is a test in which you simply read the color of a word but not the word itself.

History: I chose to do this experiment because it is fun to see people’s reactions to this test, and because it seems so easy but you discover it’s not as easy as it sounds.

Hypothesis: If the person does this test, then they will get at least 3 words wrong.

Process: My control group was 5 people reading words with the same color as they are written. For example, I would show them the word red and it would be colored red, and so forth. My experimental group was 10 of my friends who read a series of the names of colors with a different color inside. I also told these same people to do a test with uncommon words like tan and lavender. The independent variable is the tests being given out. These tests were given out mostly at lunch but some were in a few of my classes and I just showed them a picture on my phone like the one you see below. After I showed them the one with different colors I showed them the one with uncommon colors like you see below. I showed the people these pictures on December 5th 2015. The first picture is the one I used for the control group. The second one is the picture I showed them first, and the second picture I showed them after. Here are the pictures of the Stroop effect that I used:

1

2

3

As you can see, people missed a lot more words on the first test given out than the second test. The average words missed on the first test was 1.7. However the average on the second test was .1. These averages prove that the second test was much easier for the people to do correctly.

My hypothesis was proven wrong. I predicted people would miss more words, and they surprised me. Some variables that would change the outcome would be if the person had just woken up, or if they had just done many brain games. If they had just woken up...