Introduction

The Stroop effect is one of the best known phenomena in cognitive psychology. The Stroop
effect occurs when people do the Stroop task, which is explained and demonstrated in detail
in this lesson. The Stroop effect is related to selective attention, which is the ability to respond
to certain environmental stimuli while ignoring others.

The Stroop task

In the Stroop task, people simply look at color words, such as blue, red, or green. The
interesting thing is that the task is to name the color of the ink the words are printed in, while
fully ignoring the actual word meaning. It turns out that this quite difficult, and you can find
out exactly how difficult this is below.

It is very easy to name the color of the word "black" when it is printed in black (most text is
written in black ink). It is also very easy to name the color of the word "red" printed in red ink
color.

It is difficult, though, when the word and the ink color are different! This extent of this
difficulty is what we call the Stroop effect.

Even though it was developed in the 1930s, the Stroop task is still frequently used in
cognitive psychological laboratories to measure how well people can do something that
clashes with their typical response pattern. This task requires a certain level of "mental
control". That is, you need to be aware of the task you are doing now and ignore how you
would normally respond to words. This requires "control" over your own default cognitive
processing.

The Stroop effect

As you now understand, the Stroop effect is the degree of difficulty people have with naming
the color of the ink rather than the word itself. In Stroop’s words, there is "interference"
between the color of the ink and the word meaning. This interference occurs no matter how
hard you try, which means that it is uncontrollable with the best conscious effort. It implies
that at least part of our information processing occurs automatically. It happens, whether you
want it or not! Do you think this is true? If you think it is not true, how can you test this?
Could you argue that if you train yourself long enough, you would no longer show the Stroop
effect?

In Stroop’s original study, there were three different experiments, and they were slightly
different from the demonstration below. This is mainly for practical reasons. That is, it is
easier to measure the exact time a button press takes place than to measure when people start
saying a word using voice-key technology.

In pictures

In the original study by Stroop, people were shown a list of words printed in different colors.
They were asked to name the ink color, and to ignore the meaning of the word. It turned out
that people were slower and made more mistakes when there was a clash between the word
meaning and the ink color (e.g., the word "green" in red ink color).

Figure 1. The conditions of the Stroop experiment. Condition A is "compatible", and

Condition B is "incompatible".

Why is the effect interesting?

This effect is quite surprising. The task is surpringly more difficult that you would think when
you just read about the Stroop task. Something that is surprising is interesting, because it
forces you to think: Hey, why is this happening? It is not as easy as I had expected!

One of the explanations for the difficulty is that we are so used to processing word meaning
while ignoring the physical features of words, that it is a learned response. The Stroop task
requires us to do something which we have never learned and which is opposite what we
normally do. MacLeod’s 1991 paper is still an excellent overview of about the Stroop task
(although already more than 2 decades old).