John Stroop
Paying attention to how we process information
Intro
John Stroop was an experimental psychologist, best known for developing the Stroop test. In this task, participants are given a list of words, printed in different colors. They are asked to read the color of each word, as opposed to the word itself, and the delay this generally causes is known as the Stroop effect. Stroop’s work opened the door to decades of research into how our brains switch between automatic and deliberate information processing. Stroop was a respected lecturer at David Lipscomb College, where he spent most of his career teaching and researching. Despite his legacy in the field of psychology, Stroop’s primary focus throughout his life was his devout Christian faith. He preached in churches across Tennessee and further afield, and published several books based on his biblical teachings. The Stroop test grew increasingly popular in the 1970s and 1980s, and is still used today in both research and clinical information-processing settings.
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
