John Ridley Stroop

Type: Person

As of November 2026, John Ridley Stroop has been mentioned in one podcast episode on Stuff You Should Know (Feb 2026). Credited with discovering the Stroop effect (1935), used as a concrete demonstration of how fast, automatic processing can interfere with deliberate thinking.

John Ridley Stroop, better known as J. Ridley Stroop, was an American psychologist whose research in cognition and interference continues to be considered by some as the gold standard in attentional studies and profound enough to continue to be cited for relevance into the 21st century. However, Christianity was the real passion of his life; psychology was simply an occupation.