International Journal of Arts and Humanities (IJAH)

Created in the 1930s by American psychologist John Ridley Stroop, the Stroop Interference Effect is a set of empirical findings, demonstrating that there is an asymmetry in the observed interference between color-word reading and color naming. The purpose of this study was to use the Stroop Effect to determine if there is an observable effect of color compatibility on color recognition. Our participants consisted of an accidental (convenience) sample of n = 30 undergraduate junior and senior psychology majors enrolled in the same Experimental Psychology Lab class at Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University. The general procedure involved the participants naming twenty different ink colors on two separate lists, one with matched colors and the other with mismatched colors, as fast as they could without making any errors. It was hypothesized that it would take longer to recognize mismatched colors due to Stroop’s observed interference between color-word reading and color naming, in addition to the speed-processing and selective-attention theories, resulting in a significant difference between mismatched and matched colors. The repeated measures t-test determined that there was, in fact, a significant relationship between the two variables, meaning that color compatibility did have an observable effect on color recognition. The Stroop effect is a phenomenon that involves a set of empirical findings, demonstrating that there is an asymmetry in the observed interference between color-word reading and color naming (Dennis, 1999). Created in the 1930s by American psychologist John Ridley Stroop, the phenomenon’s original paper became the most famous, and most frequently cited in the history of psychology, along with being replicated by hundreds of researchers (Cherry, 2018). It is illustrated in experiments where an individual must say the color of a word, but not the word’s name. For example, the word “green” might be printed in yellow ink and you must say “yellow” instead of what the word actually reads. The delayed reaction times produced when the color of the word does not match the name of the word is the actual effect that Stroop identified. He predicted that it takes about 75% longer to recognize mismatched colors than matched colors. Two theories were produced in essence of clarifying the phenomenon: selective attention theory and speed processing theory.