Modification and Origin of Certain Beliefs in Superstition Among 96 College Students

An experiment was designed to study the effect of practice on anagram solving. This was accomplished through the presentation of three anagram lists to 243 subjects and a comparison made of first-list performance (early stage of practice) with last-list performance (later stage of practice). The results revealed the presence of a significantly greater number of solutions on the last, rather than the first list, clearly indicating the presence of a general practice effect in the solution of anagrams. The failure of earlier studies to demonstrate this phenomenon was attributed to the use of relatively short anagram lists in previous research.