In that I silently presupposed that
the perception of the uniformity must be something disturbing and
disagreeable and the recognition of variations something which
stimulates the mind pleasantly. But when I came to examine the
question experimentally, I became convinced that such a hypothesis is
erroneous, and if I interpret the results correctly, I should say that
practically the opposite relation exists. Those who recognize the
uniformities readily are not the ones who are disturbed by them.
I proceeded in the following way. To make use of a large number of
subjects accustomed to intelligent self-observation, I made the first
series of experiments with the regular students in my psychology
lecture course in Harvard University. Last winter I had more than four
hundred men students in psychology who all took part in that
introductory series. The task which I put before them in a number of
variations was this: I used lists of words of which half, or one more
or less than half, belonged to one single conceptional group. There
were names of flowers, or cities, or poets, or parts of the body, or
wild animals, and so on. The remaining words of the list, on the other
hand, were without inner connection and without similarity. The
similar and the dissimilar words were mixed. The subjects listened to
such a list of words and then had to decide without counting from the
mere impression whether the similar words were more or equally or less
numerous than the dissimilar words.
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