The investigation into the effect of social facilitation on the performance level within the Stroop effect.
The investigation into the effect of social facilitation on the performance level within the Stroop effect.
Abstract
The relationship between social facilitation (first discovered by Triplett in 1898) and the issue of interference within the Stroop effect were investigated. Fifty participants were recruited and took part in a repeated measures design. Participants were given a list of congruent and incongruent words in single and paired situations. The overall findings of this study suggest that there is a significant difference between congruent and incongruent conditions; this is consistent with previous research on social facilitation, however more attention is needed to discover the full effects of a researcher’s presence.
Introduction
The Stroop effect is a psychological phenomenon which has become extremely robust due to it tapping into essential operations of cognition which, in turn, offer clues into fundamental cognitive processes (Macleod, 1991). Stroop’s (1935) original study investigated colour naming, and word reading, in a way not previously examined in research - in that, Stroop combined both the colour and the word. The experiment compounded a stimulus where the word was incongruent with the ink colour, for example, the word red written in blue ink. Stroop (1935) interpreted this idea from Catell (1886) who used coloured objects and words to demonstrate that coloured objects took longer to name than words and stressed the underlying reason for this was that the process of reading is automatic. Stroop (1935) investigated the slower reaction times and mistakes that occurred referring to it as the ‘interference act’ suggesting that reading a word is an automatic process, where naming a colour is not, thus supporting Cattel’s findings. The theory of automaticity was also supported by ‘The speed of processing model’ (Fraisse, 1969) which emphasised word processing to be much faster than colour processing. Additionally, the parallel
Abstract
The relationship between social facilitation (first discovered by Triplett in 1898) and the issue of interference within the Stroop effect were investigated. Fifty participants were recruited and took part in a repeated measures design. Participants were given a list of congruent and incongruent words in single and paired situations. The overall findings of this study suggest that there is a significant difference between congruent and incongruent conditions; this is consistent with previous research on social facilitation, however more attention is needed to discover the full effects of a researcher’s presence.
Introduction
The Stroop effect is a psychological phenomenon which has become extremely robust due to it tapping into essential operations of cognition which, in turn, offer clues into fundamental cognitive processes (Macleod, 1991). Stroop’s (1935) original study investigated colour naming, and word reading, in a way not previously examined in research - in that, Stroop combined both the colour and the word. The experiment compounded a stimulus where the word was incongruent with the ink colour, for example, the word red written in blue ink. Stroop (1935) interpreted this idea from Catell (1886) who used coloured objects and words to demonstrate that coloured objects took longer to name than words and stressed the underlying reason for this was that the process of reading is automatic. Stroop (1935) investigated the slower reaction times and mistakes that occurred referring to it as the ‘interference act’ suggesting that reading a word is an automatic process, where naming a colour is not, thus supporting Cattel’s findings. The theory of automaticity was also supported by ‘The speed of processing model’ (Fraisse, 1969) which emphasised word processing to be much faster than colour processing. Additionally, the parallel