by Adam Alter
During the same era, a physician named Felix Deutsch described a series of fascinating case studies that added to the confusion. In one case, a woman came to him suffering from tachycardia (heart palpitations) and shortness of breath. Her resting pulse rate was 112 beats per minute, 40 beats higher than the ideal rate of 72 beats per minute. Deutsch responded by placing the patient in a red room for four brief treatment sessions. After one session, her pulse dropped from 112 to 80 beats per minute. After four sessions, her pulse rate dropped to 74, and remained there long after the session ended. She explained that the red room had produced a warming sensation, alleviating the sense of choking that had plagued her for days. Deutsch was delighted, but the plot thickened when another patient arrived with dangerously high blood pressure. This patient spent time in a green room rather than a red room, and her results were just as miraculous. After seven sessions, her blood pressure had fallen from 250/130 to a still unhealthy but no longer critical 180/110 (a normal reading is 120/80). While the warmth of red comforted one patient, the coolness of green comforted another, and failing to run meticulous tests, Deutsch was never able to explain why two apparently opposing colors had the same therapeutic effects. One possibility is that the patients were responding positively to attention from a kind and devoted expert, rather than to the treatment itself. Other psychologists had called this phenomenon the Hawthorne effect some years earlier, when workers at a factory known as Hawthorne Works had worked harder and more diligently when researchers both brightened and dimmed the factory floor’s lighting. Apparently, the level of illumination was irrelevant; the workers who were normally ignored by superiors were suddenly the focus of attention, and they responded with a burst of enthusiasm. In the end, Deutsch’s findings failed to establish that either red or green rooms dampen racing heart rates and high blood pressure any more than they showed that patients will sometimes respond to any form of treatment if they expect to feel better.
The modern science of color research is richer and far more rigorous than it was in the days of Auroratone films and hit-or-miss color treatments. According to today’s color psychologists, colors play a powerful role in human decision making for two reasons. The first reason is that colors affect us physically, as the sawmill workers showed when their body clocks adapted better to shift changes under blue rather than white or yellow light. The second reason is that we associate colors with almost every imaginable pleasant and unpleasant object that populates our planet, which might explain why crime rates declined in Japan and Scotland when local authorities introduced blue streetlights that mimicked the lights atop police cars.
How Color Affects Us, Part 1: Colors and the Human Body
In 1921, Swiss psychologist Hermann Rorschach introduced a psychological test that remained popular for more than fifty years. Patients who completed the Rorschach test were asked to describe what they saw in ten inkblots that looked something like moths, humans, and other animals. Patients who were slow to perceive two humans interacting in one image were said to suffer from social anxiety, and those who saw a threatening male in another were said to have trouble with men and authority. The unreliable test waned in popularity as psychologists introduced superior alternatives, but not before it paved the way for a string of fascinating color experiments.
In the 1950s, two psychologists noticed that a small group of schizophrenic patients responded peculiarly to two of the Rorschach plates. When shown images two and three, the patients went into a so-called color shock, sitting in dumbstruck stupor while the tester waited for a response. Unlike the other images, these featured small red blotches alongside the dominant black blots. Images two and three weren’t the only images with colorful elements, but something about the stark red patches inspired an unusual response.
The psychologists became curious, so they created a room with a white light and a red light, which they controlled with two separate switches. They recruited nearly a hundred people to participate in an experiment, half of whom were nearby university students—the “normal” group—and half of whom were schizophrenic patients from a nearby state hospital. Each group conducted a series of tests while bathed in both white and red light, and the experimenters measured the difference in their performance under the two colors of light. One of the tests was a thirty-second tremor test, in which the experimenters measured whether the participants’ hands were shaking while they tried to remain completely still. Both groups shook more vigorously under the red light, but the effect was especially pronounced among a small group of the schizophrenics. Some of them shook uncontrollably, complaining that their hearts were racing, and they felt “shocked” by the light. Others complained that they felt sick to their stomachs, and another muttered that “part of my brain, heart, and kidneys were right with God at times but not under this light.” The experience obviously frightened many of them, a few jerking in surprise and another urinating uncontrollably when the room was first bathed in red. A second study showed similar results among “normal” males who were exposed to red light but not blue light, suggesting that it wasn’t merely the strangeness of non-white light that produced erratic responses. This time, the participants were more anxious and hostile when the light was red rather than blue or white, and their visual cortex—the part of the brain that responds to color—was more active under the red light. Their heart rate and blood pressure also escalated, showing that the red light had strong physical effects.
While red environments elevate blood flow and nervous system responses inside our bodies, they also appear to change how we see the world looking outward. One researcher described how a woman suffering from cerebellar disease struggled to walk upright. According to early observations, her gait was unsteady, she wobbled when she walked, and sometimes she became dizzy and fell over without the aid of a wall or another person. Sometimes her dizziness was debilitating, and at other times it wasn’t as acute, enabling her to walk with relatively little difficulty. With the help of her physician, she came to realize that she was especially dizzy when she wore red dresses. When she wore green or blue, she was calmer and her symptoms subsided.
The same researcher described other similar cases, which convinced him that the color red was a genuine physical menace. Red similarly throws off physical judgment even in people without existing medical disorders. People appear to write more erratically in red light than in green light, and their writing becomes less coherent when they write with red ink rather than blue, black, or green ink. When asked to estimate the length and weight of sticks and other objects, people are far more accurate under green than red light. They tend to suffer from macropsia and micropsia—the illusion that objects are larger or smaller than they actually are.
These effects aren’t just idly fascinating; they also influence how we experience our lives every day. The same red that agitates people in a scientific laboratory also agitates them when they load web pages with red backgrounds. In one series of experiments, people felt more agitated while waiting for a red or yellow web page to load than when the same page had a blue background. This agitation made them impatient, so they believed that the yellow and red pages took longer to load than the blue page did, though both pages loaded at the same speed. Later they also claimed they would be less likely to recommend the site to a friend.
Through the fog of elevated heart rates and distorted perceptions of time and space, researchers have struggled to explain precisely why the color red incites physical rebellion. Color science is nothing without number crunching and comparing how people react to different-colored rooms, lights, and computer monitors, but sometimes the most striking insights come from simple verbal responses. For decades, researchers have asked test subjects why they responded so intensely to the color red, and dozens have replied that it disturbs them because it reminds them of blood and, consequently, injury, illness, and even death. Colors are powerful, not just because we respond to them physically but also because they remind us of the o
bjects that embody them—red blood, blue sky, yellow sun, and green grass.
How Color Affects Us, Part 2: Links Between Colors and Everyday Objects
Almost a century ago, a Japanese psychologist became curious about the color preferences of young people. How old were they when they developed strong color preferences? Could they explain why they liked some colors more than others? Were those explanations accurate? Children are difficult test subjects, so the researcher began by giving them colored crayons. Though he continued to focus on their color preferences (most of them liked the primary colors: red, yellow, and blue), he noticed something interesting about their drawings during the experiment’s opening interaction. Instead of haphazardly drawing whatever came to mind, they seemed to draw very different objects with different colors. With black crayons, they almost always drew buildings, cars, and other inanimate objects, very rarely drawing people, animals, or natural scenes. With colored crayons, they drew people and animals, apparently associating vibrant colors with life.
People across the world have very different associations with the same colors, which also suggests that these links are a product of the environment as well as inbuilt biological preferences. Most people across the world favor blue—the so-called blue phenomenon—but that’s also because it’s universally associated with clear skies and calming oceans. The few countries that associate blue primarily with sadness—Hong Kong, for example—also tend to rate it less favorably. People in the United States like black, possibly because they associate it with strength and masculinity, while it’s less popular in Colombia, where it implies sadness and formality. Color associations are especially powerful in the realm of foods, where red implies the richness of cherries, apples, and red meat, and purple implies that something’s amiss (unless you’re eating acai berries, one of the few natural foods that take on a purplish hue).
Whether colors influence us physically, or because they prompt us to think of related concepts, they shape our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors across a huge range of contexts. As the rest of this chapter shows, the same color sometimes has very different effects across different contexts. Red stoplights, stop signs, and flashing lights warn motorists to be vigilant, while the same color red stirs thoughts of romantic passion and affection. Indeed, no context means more to humans, biologically and sentimentally, than the context of love and sex, and a team of psychologists has taken up the mantle of determining which colors maximize (and minimize) the prospects of mating success.
Colors in Love
The burgeoning world of online dating now attracts more than $1 billion in subscriber fees in the United States alone. As the market matures, online daters are learning the importance of crafting a strong profile while avoiding the pitfalls that plague more careless subscribers. In late 2009, dating site OkCupid released a report that described the dos and don’ts of online dating. For example, daters who send messages with netspeak terms like “ur,” “r” and “u” attract responses to fewer than 10 percent of their opening messages. (The average response rate is roughly 32 percent.) “How’s it going?” is more successful (53 percent), but “hi,” which lacks the force of a direct question, fares more poorly (24 percent).
OkCupid’s report is silent on the matter of color, but several enterprising social psychologists have picked up the slack. It’s not immediately obvious which color should maximize romantic success. Blue is the most popular color in the world, gray and black are associated with dominance and power, green is supposed to be soothing, and red is typically associated with love in popular culture.
In one experiment, five young women spent the day hitchhiking near a famous peninsula in Brittany, France, their safety monitored by several hidden observers. The women changed their shirts throughout the day, choosing randomly from a menu of black, white, red, yellow, blue, and green. Female drivers weren’t particularly sympathetic, stopping only 5–9 percent of the time regardless of the color of the hitchhikers’ T-shirts. Male motorists, on the other hand, were more considerate and more discerning: whereas only 12–14 percent of all male motorists stopped when the women wore black, white, yellow, blue, or green, 21 percent stopped when the women wore red shirts. Since only men were swayed by the color red, the researcher argued that red enhances romantic appeal specifically, rather than platonic attraction more generally.
A similar experiment two years later suggested that the result wasn’t a fluke. Sixty-four French women who had posted ads on a personals website agreed to participate in a yearlong study to test this question. Each woman created an ad featuring a color photo of her face and upper body, over which she wore a plain-colored T-shirt. For nine months the ads weren’t changed at all—except for the color of the women’s tops. Every two weeks the experimenter digitally altered the color of each woman’s top, choosing from the same six colors available to the female hitchhikers in the earlier experiment. Then they watched and waited while the women recorded the e-mails they received from thousands of interested men. As in the hitchhiking study, the women were far more popular when their shirts were red. During the nine-month period, 14–16 percent of their e-mails arrived when they wore the black, white, yellow, blue, and green shirts—but 21 percent arrived when they wore the red shirt.
In explaining why red enhances sexual appeal, researchers reach back to the world of lower-order animals, where rich displays of red tend to promote sexual success. The reasoning behind this relationship differs for males and females. Female animals display their biological readiness for mating with vivid patches of red on their genitals, chest, and face. As females approach ovulation, their elevated estrogen levels promote blood flow, which in turn reddens their skin. Like lower-order animals, women experience reddening of their skin as they approach ovulation, and whenever they’re sexually excited or aroused. It’s no coincidence, then, that femmes fatales in Jezebel, Dial M for Murder, and A Streetcar Named Desire wear red dresses, and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne was forced to advertise her adulterous past by wearing a scarlet letter A, rather than a letter of green, blue, or black. Meanwhile, a red heart signifies the romance of Valentine’s Day, and red-light-district workers wear red lipstick and rouge to encourage business. In general, the color red signifies sexuality and attraction, both for biological reasons and because we’ve come to associate red with sexuality in literature and popular culture.
Among lower-order male animals, the color red is a sign of health, vitality, status, and virility. For example, male mandrills display patches of red on their faces and genitalia, and these patches are particularly vivid among alpha males. The same deep red coloration distinguishes alpha amphipods, sticklebacks, finches, gelada baboons, and males of numerous other species from their sexually inferior counterparts. Humans show similar tendencies, with dominant males across time and cultures wearing distinctive red face paint and garments. The most powerful men of ancient Rome were known as coccinati, literally “the ones who wear red”; they distinguished themselves from the plebs by wearing bright red clothing. Even today VIPs and luminaries strut down a red carpet, while the masses cheer from gray concrete sidelines.
Since evolutionary anecdotes suggest that the color red should appeal to both sexes, two social psychologists decided to test whether irrelevant patches of red enhance the sexual attractiveness of men and women. They asked heterosexual men and women to rate the attractiveness of members of the opposite sex depicted in printed photographs. In one round of experiments, they varied whether the men and women in the photographs wore red shirts and sweaters or shirts and sweaters of another color. The same photos earned higher attractiveness ratings when their subjects wore red clothing. The results held regardless of whether the student raters were American, English, German, or Chinese, suggesting that the effects weren’t merely driven by a pro-red bias that affects people from some cultures but not others. Furthermore, the men and women who wore red weren’t rated more positively on all dimensions; for example, they d
idn’t seem more likable, friendly, or outgoing. Instead, they specifically seemed more sexually attractive and worthy of sexual attention. In another experiment, the researcher showed the men a photo of a woman wearing either a red or blue shirt, and led them into a room where they would ostensibly meet her a few minutes later. In the meantime, they were told to arrange two chairs so the two of them could have a conversation. As a display of desired intimacy, the men moved the two chairs significantly closer together when the woman wore a red shirt (about five feet apart) than when the woman wore a blue shirt (about six feet apart). The differences disappeared when heterosexual men rated the attractiveness of other men, and when heterosexual women rated the attractiveness of other women; in short, red shirts only made people seem more attractive to potential mates. The message here couldn’t be simpler: if you’re trying to attract a member of the opposite sex, red dresses and red shirts give you an ever-so-slight romantic advantage.