In other experiments the
arrangement was that two different lists were read and that in the two
lists a larger or smaller number of words were repeated from the first
list. Here, too, the subjects had to decide from the mere impression
whether the repeated words were in the majority or not. In every
experiment the judgment referred to those words which belonged to the
same group and which were in this sense uniform, or to the repeated
words, and it had to be stated with reference to them whether their
number was larger, equal to, or smaller than the different words. If
all replies had been correct, the judgment would have been 40 per cent
equal, 30 per cent smaller, and 30 per cent larger, as they were
arranged in perfect symmetry. As soon as I had the results from the
students, we figured out for every one what number he judged equal,
smaller, or greater. Then we divided the equal judgments by 2 and
added half of them to the larger and half to the smaller judgments. In
this way we were enabled by one figure to characterize the whole
tendency of the individual. We found that in the whole student body
there was a tendency to underestimate the number of the similar or of
the repeated words. The majority of my students had a stronger
impression from the varying objects than from those which were in a
certain sense equal. Yet this tendency appeared in very different
degrees and for about a fourth of the participants the opposite
tendency prevailed.
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