Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces That Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave

by Adam Alter

  Colors at Work and School

  When people aren’t seeking romantic partners, they spend much of their time at work, and one critical component of professional success is intellectual achievement. Most classical accounts describe academic prowess as the product of good genes, a nurturing environment, and plenty of hard work, but very few if any experts include ambient color in the list of relevant factors. But here, too, colors play a surprisingly prominent role. For a start, people are far more likely to remember pictures of a place presented in color rather than in black and white, and memory is a critical component of intellectual performance. According to the psychologists who studied the phenomenon, we’re able to bury colored scenes deeper in memory, and to later retrieve them more effectively than identical scenes presented in black and white. In a sense, memories are like fish that float through the sea of our minds, and we’re more likely to snag an old memory if we plunge many hooks into the sea. Color is a particularly large hook covered with tasty bait, and black-and-white memories are therefore comparatively elusive.

  Colored memories are better retrieved than black-and-white memories, but not all colors have the same effect on intellectual performance. Students learn to fear the presence of red ink on exams and assignments, and some U.S. and Australian states have even banned teachers from correcting academic work with red ink. Experts who prefer black or blue ink argue that red ink has become inextricably linked with failure and criticism, so students are likely to disengage when they’re faced with a page covered in red. Some quarters perceive this policy as needlessly paternalistic, and one conservative politician in the Australian state of Queensland described the policy as “kooky, loopy, loony, and lefty.” The policy may indeed be loopy and lefty, but it also has strong support from a number of academic studies.

  In one study, researchers asked a group of university undergraduates to correct an essay that was ostensibly written by a student who was learning to speak English. In fact, the experimenters fabricated the essay and inserted a range of errors. The undergraduates were asked to identify any errors in spelling, grammar, word choice, and punctuation. Some of the students were randomly selected to correct the essay using a blue pen, and the others were randomly selected to use a red pen. Although the students read exactly the same essay, those who were given a red pen found an average of twenty-four errors, whereas those who were given a blue pen found an average of only nineteen errors. In a follow-up study, students read an essay advocating the benefits of school field trips, and again they graded the essay using either a red pen or a blue pen. On average, those who used the red pen gave the essays a score of 76/100, whereas those who used the blue pen gave the essays a score of 80/100. The “don’t grade in red pen” policy may be eccentric, but students can’t be blamed for asking to be graded in blue pen when their grades suffer under the scrutiny of red ink.

  Unfortunately, red ink is a double-edged sword, also causing students to perform more poorly in the first place. In a landmark series of studies, students attained lower test scores when they were exposed to the color red, rather than black, green, gray, or white. In some studies, the students wrote an experiment’s ID number in red, green, or black pen before completing fifteen anagram puzzles. The puzzles required the students to unscramble letter strings like NIDRK to form English words (in this case, DRINK). The students who wrote their ID number with a red pen answered an average of 22 percent fewer questions correctly than those who wrote their ID number in black or green pen. In other studies, the first page of the test booklet was colored red, gray, white, or green. Again, the students achieved lower scores on several different tests when the first page was red rather than gray, white, or green. In one test they solved 18 percent fewer number-string completion puzzles (e.g., which number comes next: 18, 16, 19, 15, 20, 14, 21,__; the answer is 13); in another, they solved 37 percent fewer analogy questions (e.g., expensive is to rarely as cheap is to __; the answer is frequently).

  It’s worth taking a moment to compare the magnitude of these effects with the subtlety of the color manipulations. Students study for days on end and parents pay thousands of dollars for professional tutoring, but even diligent students with wealthy parents would be delighted to find that their hard work and hard-earned cash yield test score improvements in the neighborhood of 37 percent. Meanwhile, these studies suggest that replacing your red pen with a black or green pen, or reprinting the red cover page of an exam in a different color, has similar effects.

  The same researchers also wanted to know why red hampers academic performance. It turns out that the color red activates the right hemisphere of the frontal cortex, a pattern of brain activity that typically indicates avoidance motivation. Avoidance motivation is the technical term for a state in which you’re more concerned with avoiding failure than you are with achieving success. It’s a distracting state of mind that all but guarantees poorer performance when you’re trying to solve questions that require insight and mental effort. Psychologists have also shown that people literally recoil from the color red, leaning slightly farther backward in their seats when they’re about to begin a test with a red rather than green cover. None of these effects occurs consciously, but when they occur together it becomes clear why the color red can be so damaging in academic contexts.

  Despite these results, there’s an important twist to this story. For some intellectual tasks, the tendency for red to prime avoidant mind-sets promotes just the right kind of thinking. Avoidance is also associated with vigilance, so tasks that require attention to detail are easier when we’re in a more vigilant mind-set. In one study, for example, students were far more vigilant when proofreading text for errors and memorizing a list of words when those tasks were presented against a red background rather than a blue background. Here vigilance and avoidance were precisely the mental states that promoted success. (In other experiments, when the tasks required creativity, the researchers replicated the earlier results, since avoidant states tend to stifle creative thinking.) To conclude, then, the color red inspires academic underachievement, but only when the task doesn’t require vigilance or attention to detail. For those tasks, red enhances rather than impairs performance.

  Far from the intellectual world of school and academic performance, color also has a striking impact in the sporting arena. The margin of error among elite sportspeople is tiny—a few extra pounds of muscle and an extra training session are often enough to decide who wins and who loses. For all the effort that elite athletes put into training, sports experts have traditionally ignored the role of color in the sporting arena. According to one result, sometimes the difference between Olympic gold and no medal at all comes down to whether an athlete is randomly drawn to wear red or blue.

  Colors and Sports

  Six athletes from the 2004 Athens Olympic Games—wrestlers Istvan Majoros, Artur Taymazov, and Jung Ji-Hyun, boxers Alexander Povetkin and Odlanier Solis, and tae kwon do competitor Moon Dae-Sung—shared two important features. All six remained undefeated and won gold medals in their respective events, and before each of their quarterfinal, semifinal, and final bouts, Olympic officials had randomly assigned them to wear red uniforms rather than the alternative blue uniforms. In the world of competitive sports, where superstitious athletes refuse to wash lucky underwear, it’s hard to ignore the coincidence—and two anthropologists set out to show that the relationship between victory and the color red comes down to more than a random fluke.

  The researchers began by collecting the results of all the Greco-Roman wrestling, freestyle wrestling, tae kwon do, and boxing matches at the 2004 Athens Olympic Games. For each of the 457 matches, they recorded whether the competitor wearing red beat the competitor in blue. The results were astonishing. In all four sports, the red competitors won more bouts than the blue competitors, and red competitors won 55 percent of their bouts overall. The effect was especially strong when the competitors were evenly matched—when, theoretically, even trivial fa
ctors might tip the balance one way or the other. When the competitors were seeded identically, the red competitor won a staggering 62 percent of all matches. It’s hard to escape the irony that the same sporting bodies that seek to eliminate performance-enhancing drugs also require one of the two competitors in each bout to wear a performance-enhancing red uniform.

  There’s no obvious reason why red should function like a psychological steroid. It’s certainly not a physical or tangible aid, because the red uniforms are identical to the blue uniforms in fabric and fit, so the only remaining possibility is that people think and act differently when they see the color red. One possibility, which overlaps with the mating advantages of wearing red, is that the color red is biologically and evolutionarily associated with dominance and aggression. When animals fight, their blood vessels dilate and their faces redden with the flush of physical exertion. Competitors who wear red might, therefore, feel more dominant than competitors who wear blue, and competitors who wear blue might perceive their red-clothed opponents as particularly aggressive or dominant. Since the outcomes of pugilistic events like boxing and wrestling are decided in part by which competitor is more dominant, aggressive, and psychologically commanding, the outcome is subtly biased in favor of the competitor who wears red.

  While red-clad competitors might feel more dominant and commanding than their blue-clad counterparts, the referee who decides the outcome of the match might be partly responsible for the effect. Several sports psychologists showed that referees are indeed swayed by the color of the competitors’ clothing. They asked forty-two professional tae kwon do referees to score a series of tae kwon do bouts between a competitor wearing red protective gear and a second competitor wearing blue protective gear. The referees applied official World Taekwondo Federation rules, in which competitors earn two points for striking their opponent in the face, one point for striking their opponent in the body, and a one-point deduction for illegal conduct. The rules are designed to be objective, so two referees should ideally award the same number of points for the same conduct. Half of the pool of referees scored the original video footage of the bouts, with one competitor wearing red and the other wearing blue. Meanwhile, the researchers digitally altered the footage so the remaining referees watched exactly the same footage, except this time they switched the color of the competitors’ protective gear. Now the competitor who wore red in the original footage wore blue protective gear, and the competitor who wore blue in the original footage wore red. If the referees were insensitive to color, the same competitor should have received the same score regardless of whether he wore red or blue clothing—but that’s not what the researchers found. The competitors who wore red clothing in the original footage scored, on average, 8 points to their competitors’ average score of 7 points. Then, when the colors were reversed, the competitor wearing red (and formerly wearing blue in the original footage) won the bouts by an average score of 8–7. The referees therefore awarded the competitors wearing red more points than they awarded the competitors wearing blue, even when they were judging an identical (but recolored) performance.

  In the world of professional team sports, one color seems to trump the aggression implied even by red. In the mid-1980s, two social psychologists examined the penalty records of twenty-one National Hockey League and twenty-eight National Football League teams. They paid special attention to the five NHL and five NFL teams with black uniforms—those whose uniforms were more than 50 percent black. Not only did a group of students perceive those uniforms to be particularly malevolent, but the teams wearing those uniforms also attracted many more penalties than their less darkly colored competitors. Meanwhile, when the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Vancouver Canucks traded in their non-black NHL uniforms for black uniforms in the late 1970s, they almost immediately began conceding more penalties. Pittsburgh, relatively polite in their non-black 1970s incarnation, conceded a fairly tame eight penalty minutes per game. Their new black uniforms ushered in a penalty-rich era, during which they conceded twelve penalty minutes per game—a record trumped only by their black-wearing Pennsylvanian rivals, the Philadelphia Flyers. The researchers considered two possible explanations for these results, and found evidence for both: people behave more aggressively when they wear black clothing; and referees and onlookers see more aggression in the same actions when they’re committed by people wearing black rather than gray or white clothing.

  These results show how difficult it can be to guarantee fairness in the world of professional sports. Even when two competitors eschew steroids, blood doping, and other illegal performance-enhancing aids, the lucky competitor assigned to wear red is at a distinct advantage. Similarly, teams that wear aggression-inducing black uniforms seem inevitably drawn to the penalty box. These results show not only how insidiously the world around us shapes how we think, feel, and behave, but also how difficult it can be to construct a fair and just world free from bias. Red uniforms create an unfair advantage, black uniforms provoke undue aggression, and blue and white uniforms inspire comparatively meek behavior.

  Colors and Morality

  It doesn’t take a big leap to connect sporting colors with moral concepts—the dominance of red; the meekness of blue; and, perhaps most damaging in a world obsessed with skin color, the brutality of black and the purity of white. Given these associations, would sporting contests be fairer if athletes were forced to wear different shades of gray? Unfortunately, even this bland solution addresses only part of the problem, because the labels “light” and “dark” have their own intrusive connotations. If you were forced to decide which of the terms “light” and “dark” represents virtue, morality, and nobility, and which represents vice, immorality, and baseness, which would you choose? If you’re anything like most Americans, Germans, Danes, Indians, and even central African Ndembu tribespeople, you probably associate lightness with morality and darkness with immorality. These associations fall naturally from the world that surrounds us. White snow is pristine, but only until dirt and mud sully its purity. One drop of black paint similarly ruins a bucket of white paint, but a bucket of black paint overwhelms a wayward drop of white paint. These natural relationships feed into metaphorical relationships between blackness and contaminating evil on the one hand, and whiteness and frail, virtuous purity on the other.

  Lending empirical heft to this claim, two social psychologists have shown that people struggle to reverse the association between white and good, and black and bad. To study the relationship between blackness and morality, the researchers adopted a popular experimental test called the Stroop task. To give you a sense of how the Stroop task works, look at the three words written below. Your task is to state the color of the text in which each word is written:

  It’s not easy to correctly utter the words “black, white” when you’re simultaneously reading the words “red, blue.” The Stroop task turns one of our strengths—the ability to read effortlessly—into a weakness, by asking us to ignore the words that we’re reading and instead to focus on the color of the text. The experimenters cleverly tweaked the Stroop task to show that we tend to associate whiteness with virtue and morality, and blackness with vice and immorality. As with the classic example, the students who completed their study were asked to decide whether words like these, below, were written in black or white text:

  The students had no trouble indicating that the word CHEAT was written in black, and the word BRAVE was written in white—after years of associating blackness with immorality and whiteness with morality, they were primed to perceive the “moral” words as white and the “immoral” words as black. They had significantly more trouble stating that the word VIRTUE was written in black and the word SIN was written in white, since these pairings violated the associations they’d formed over many years.

  Why should we care if people are slow to state that the word SIN is written in white, while the word VIRTUE is written in black? What could these arcane results mean for the way we
live our lives? Imagine now that instead of looking at four abstract words, you’re sitting in the jury box looking at a defendant accused of a heinous crime. If you’re quicker to associate the black text with cheating than with bravery, you might also more readily associate a black defendant with cheating than bravery. Similarly, if you’re quicker to associate white text with virtue than sin, you might struggle to associate the white defendant with the concept of sin rather than virtue. These results are more than mere curiosities; they also suggest one reason why police officers are more likely to stop, detain, and ultimately arrest a black man rather than a white man. Moreover, children aren’t born innately prejudiced against black people; until the age of four or five years, perhaps once they’ve formed associations between whiteness and virtue and blackness and vice, they tend not to show evidence of anti-black prejudice at all. Of course, there are many reasons why people might come to hold damaging stereotypes (some covered earlier in chapter 5), but these results suggest that associations between blackness and immorality might subtly contribute to the ongoing problem of anti-black prejudice.

  Colors shape how we think and behave across a diverse array of contexts, and sometimes the same color has different effects depending on the context. Red fosters romance as it signals the flush of attraction, but it also prompts alertness and vigilance in the face of taxing mental tasks. Blue deters would-be criminals from misbehaving, but it also alleviates the symptoms of exhaustion and seasonal depression. Some of these effects are grounded in human biology: red acts as matchmaker because it signals sexual arousal, and blue light halts the production of sleep-inducing melatonin by mimicking the properties of natural sunlight. Other effects capitalize on associations, as blue appears to deter crime by invoking the blue lights on a police car, while red promotes vigilance by calling to mind the color of stop signs and flashing lights on emergency vehicles.