Sunday, 25 November 2012

The Small World of Words

I've been asked to encourage people to take part in an online psychology study called The Small World of Words


I get a lot of this, and I usually don't respond to such requests, but this one looks pretty interesting.

The project aims to collect the world's biggest word association database. You see a series of words and you just have to type in the first three words that pop into your head.

Here's some more about it:
On average, an adult knows about 40,000 words. Researchers in psychology and linguistics are interested in how these words are represented mentally. In this large-scale study we aim to build a network that captures this knowledge by playing the game of word associations. You can help us with this project by participating in this short and fun study.

The study consists of giving the first three words that come to mind for a list of 14 items.
All ages and nationalities are welcome, but please note that we do require all participants to be fluent English speakers.
It's the sheer scale of this that makes it cool. They've got some 60,000 participants, and over a million associations already, but they're aiming for almost 300,000 people - which would make it not just the biggest word association study ever, but the biggest psychology study of all time, as far as I know.

It only takes about 2 minutes to complete and it's actually quite revealing. Out of 14 words I managed to associate a full 3 of them with 'pain', which disturbed me somewhat.

So take a look and spread the word (associations)...

7 comments:

Mouse said...

After each word, I had such a good laugh at myself with some of the words that came to mind. The things in my head! :)

Anonymous said...

For some reason, I can never think of "just words"; it's always a very visual picture, which I then have to pick a word out of.

Unless I'm taking their directions too literally, I bet I really screwed up their study. (If that's even possible, given their lack of rigor in user selection.)

Unknown said...

Must say that 'pain' popped up several times. Recency effect created by taking the test right after reading this post?

Ed Yong said...

I'm pretty sure that James Fowler's Facebook experiment is the biggest psychology experiment of all time. That's n = 61,000,000!

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2012/09/12/a-61-million-person-experiment-on-facebook-shows-how-ads-and-friends-affect-our-voting-behaviour/

Julia said...

They need to clarify they want you to type no response if nothing comes to mind, not leave no response. Super confusing

Neuroskeptic said...

Ed: Ohhhh yeah, I forgot about that. But if we class that as a sociology experiment then we can ignore that one ;-)

Lindsay said...

I did it.

I kinda wish they had asked for more information about me, as I am autistic and believe that is relevant.

I do not think in words, so I had to fit words to the pictures that sprang to my mind. I'm not sure I actually did it the way they wanted me to; sometimes I supplied synonyms, or words relating to the various meanings of a word (like, I gave "black," "victory" and "rooster" for "crow") and once when absolutely nothing came up ("grief"), I gave three "no responses".