ABSTRACT
Educated subjects usually show trivial, well-canalized verbal associations, whereas the uneducated make more valuable, often more meaningful, associations. This behaviour would, from an intellectual point of view, be paradoxical. The associations, rich in content, offered by uneducated people are not really the products of thinking rich in content but merely those of a particular emotional attitude. The whole thing is more important to the uneducated, his emotion is greater, and for that reason he pays more attention to the experiment than the educated person and his associations are therefore richer in content. This chapter illustrates in a very interesting way by the following discovery: Investigations of the influence of the family environment on association types reveal that young people seldom belong to the predicate type; in fact, the frequency of the predicate type increases with age. It is impossible in a lecture to give a review of all the practical applications of the association experiment.
