ON A PROCEDURE ERROR IN THE FREE ASSOCIATIONS EXPERIMENT
The paper discusses the risks of distortion of the results of a free associative experiment due to the essence of its procedure. The matter is that the “canonical” experiment’s instruction urges the participants to produce and write down at least three reactions to the proposed stimulus. It doesn’t consider the risk that each subsequent reaction, the second and/or the third one, may be induced not by the initial stimulus, but by the previous reaction which thus may also act like an occasional unintentional stimulus because not intended by the researcher. Theoretically, there a risk that the obtained data might distort real connections between the intended stimulus and respondents’ reactions in the participants’ mental lexicon. But in reality the impact of such a distortion is not of major importance: the analysis of 6782 "stimulus - reaction (1, 2 or 3 reactions)" pairs shows that the number of cases where the described shift occurs is not statistically significant. The number of erroneous reactions which are obviously induced by the procedure flaw itself (that is, each of the following is given to the previous one, rather than to the stimulus) amounts to no more than 1% of the total number of reactions. Therefore, such an error can’t be considered as regular and must be referred to as insignificant. It’s clear now that cases where each reaction of the three is associated with the initial (intended) stimulus or each of the following reactions refers to the "stimulus + first reaction" complex largely predominate. At the same time, as it was argued long before by Sechenov, Polivanov, Fortunatov, and Kruchevsky ( Kruszewski), verbal associating is a random (stochastic) process, which means that a large majority of reactions’ meanings are unpredictable. On these grounds the author concludes that this is due to the peculiarities of the individual’s mental lexicon which is the product of their minds and consciousness. The way of their exteriorization must also be taken into account. When, triggered by the stimulus, the process of associating starts, a huge number of reactions is activated at the same time in the human brain, but their writing down can take place only sequentially. Thus, the linear character of writing may become partly responsible for an erroneous shift of the stimulus.