Explain the design of a Stroop task. What do the results of the task tell us about automatic processing?

Explain the design of a Stroop task. What do the results of the task tell us about automatic processing?

Stroop effect demonstrates interference in the reaction time of a task. In the original experiment participants were supposed to name the color of the ink independently of the word (for example, they would have to say "purple" if the ink was purple, even though the word was "red" ).
With this experiment Stroop discovered semantic interference, which states that naming the ink color of neutral stimuli (e.g. when the ink color and word do not interfere with each other) is faster than in incongruent conditions.
The second finding, semantic facilitation, explains the finding that naming the ink of congruent stimuli is faster (e.g. when the ink color and the word match) than when neutral stimuli are present (e.g. when the ink is black, but the word describes a color).
The third finding is that both semantic interference and facilitation disappear when the task consists of reading the word instead of naming the ink. It has been sometimes called Stroop asynchrony, and has been explained by a reduced automatization when naming colors compared to reading words.

The stroop task tests attentional function in which colour names e.g. GREEN presented in different-coloured ink. That participant is asked to name the colour of the ink as opposed to the actual word. This results in a difficult automatic processing as we cant help but read “GREEN” but we were supposed to say red.

It tells us that automatic processing can be so automatic that its actually difficult to suppress, even when trying hard to do so.