These are the hundred stimulus words of Carl Jung’s association experiment, in his order, from “The Association Method”, published in The American Journal of Psychology in 1910. He presented each word, recorded the first word given back and how long it took, in fifths of a second, and afterwards asked for each answer again.
The list
- head
- green
- water
- to sing
- dead
- long
- ship
- to pay
- window
- friendly
- to cook
- to ask
- cold
- stem
- to dance
- village
- lake
- sick
- pride
- to cook
- ink
- angry
- needle
- to swim
- voyage
- blue
- lamp
- to sin
- bread
- rich
- tree
- to prick
- pity
- yellow
- mountain
- to die
- salt
- new
- custom
- to pray
- money
- foolish
- pamphlet
- despise
- finger
- expensive
- bird
- to fall
- book
- unjust
- frog
- to part
- hunger
- white
- child
- to take care
- lead pencil
- sad
- plum
- to marry
- house
- dear
- glass
- to quarrel
- fur
- big
- carrot
- to paint
- part
- old
- flower
- to beat
- box
- wild
- family
- to wash
- cow
- friend
- luck
- lie
- deportment
- narrow
- brother
- to fear
- stork
- false
- anxiety
- to kiss
- bride
- pure
- door
- to choose
- hay
- contented
- ridicule
- to sleep
- month
- nice
- woman
- to abuse
“To cook” appears twice in the printed list, at 11 and 20. It is kept here as printed. The English words are A. A. Brill’s translation of a list Jung built in German.
Why these words
Jung explains the choice once, for the list as a whole, and never word by word.
“This formulary has been constructed after many years of experience. The words are chosen and partially arranged in such a manner as to strike easily almost all complexes of practical occurrence.”
He adds that the list mixes kinds of words on purpose, nouns such as “salt” beside verbs such as “to pray”, and that “this, too, has its definite reasons”, without giving them. In a footnote on the same page he warns that the selection “was naturally made for the German language only, and would probably have to be considerably changed for the English language.”
What he recorded beside each word
The instruction was a single sentence: “Answer as quickly as possible the first word that occurs to your mind.” (p. 220). His tables then set out, for every stimulus word, the reaction time in units of 0.2 second, the reaction itself, and a column headed “reproduction” (p. 220).
To compare one person’s times he used what he called the probable average: the middle value once all the reaction times are put in order (p. 232).
The reproduction came after the main run. Jung repeated the same stimulus words and asked whether the person still remembered their earlier answers. Where memory failed, he found, it was usually at words that had touched an emotionally charged complex, or at the word immediately after one (p. 238).
“Words are really something like condensed actions, situations, and things.”
Taking the experiment today
The browser version of the experiment times your answers the same way and reads them against your own average. Its word lists are modern selections rather than this one, because the list above was built for German speakers in 1909 and Jung himself expected it to need changing for English.
Source: C. G. Jung, “The Association Method”, The American Journal of Psychology, vol. 21, no. 2 (April 1910), pp. 219–269. Lectures delivered at Clark University in September 1909, translated by A. A. Brill. The list is on pp. 219–220. JSTOR record.