Are Men More Attractive in Red?
Our clothing says a lot about us. Cut, fabric, and design are all important. But nothing catches the eye like color. And, according to scientists, no color catches the eye more than red. Men are more attracted to women who wear red clothes. Male drivers are more likely to pick up female hitch-hikers who wear red.
But does red only boost women’s attractiveness? What about men?
In 2010, psychologist Andrew Elliot reported the results of no fewer than seven experiments, which all showed that men are more attractive when they wear red clothes or are viewed against a red background. Case closed, right?
Vera Hesslinger, another psychologist based at the University of Bamberg in Germany, wasn’t so sure. She decided to repeat Elliot’s experiments. The results of her investigation were recently published in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin and Review.
Why did Hesslinger decide to repeat Elliot’s experiments? Firstly because she was concerned that Elliot’s “flawless series” of findings “might indicate a publication bias in the reported, and thus accessible” results. I don’t like to put words in other scientists’ mouths, but this sounds like she is saying Elliot’s results appear too good to be true. Or, at the very least, too good to be the whole truth. Psychologists often wring their hands over the so-called “file-drawer effect”: the idea that positive, striking results are easier to publish and create more impact than negative or null results, which end up stuffed into a drawer. Interesting results hit the front pages; boring results never see the light of day.
Hesslinger also worried that, in focusing so intently on color, Elliot had ignored more important variables. The cut of a man’s suit may have a much greater effect on his sex appeal and status. And she didn’t like that the photographs Elliot’s research volunteers rated for attractiveness only featured six different men. Maybe some men look great in red while others are at their best in blue or black. For example, Robert Downey Jr can pull off a red suit of armor with aplomb, but Chris Evans’s Captain America would look a berk in anything but blue.
Hesslinger took the images that Elliot used in his first experiment and showed them to the students who attended one of her psychology lectures. Students on one half of the auditorium were shown a photograph of a moderately attractive man against a red background. Students on the other half of the auditorium saw the same photograph set against a white background. None of the students knew that their peers were looking at a different image. The students’ all rated the man for attractiveness on a 9 point scale.
The man was rated at 5.7 out of 9 when set against a red background. When the background was white his average score was 5.3. Sometimes small differences in attractiveness can be meaningful (or, as scientists say, “statistically significant”). But Hesslinger’s analysis revealed that this difference wasn’t meaningful. It was due to chance, and not to the red background making the man appear more attractive.
Elliot had found that a red background made a man more attractive; Hesslinger found that it didn’t.
In her second experiment, Hesslinger set black and white photographs of many different male models against the same red or white backgrounds. The models wore either business suits or casual sportswear. Again, volunteers rated the men for attractiveness. Hesslinger found a strong effect of clothing style on attractiveness: as we might expect, men in suits were more attractive than men in sportswear. But the color of the background had no effect at all.
What the heck is going on?
Similar experiments can sometimes give different results. As Hesslinger points out, what she found:
…does not call into question experimental psychological research per se, but it should remind us to keep in mind the scope and limitations of our findings obtained by means of the experimental approach we follow and the methods we use.
In other words, psychologists should be skeptical about the results of our experiments. If we tweak our methods slightly, our results might change too. And this is hardly desirable if we want to say something about how the human mind works. This is why it’s important to repeat our experiments, and to check how robust they really are.
So, what to make of all this? Are men more attractive in red, or aren’t they? To confuse matters even further, the results of another experiment were published recently in the journal Personality and Individual Differences. Pavel Prokop showed women photographs of a man set against a red or a gray background, photographs that were very similar to those used by Elliot and by Hesslinger. When women were in the fertile phase of their menstrual cycles (between 8 and 13 days after the start of their period) they found the man surrounded by red more sexually attractive. There was no effect of color at other times of the month.
I don’t know if this result will have made Hesslinger see red, but what’s clear is that psychologists aren’t going to tire of studying the link between color and attraction any time soon.
Hesslinger, V. M., Goldbach, L., & Carbon, C.-C. (in press). Men in red: A reexamination of the red-attractiveness effect. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review. Read summary
Prokop, P., Pazda, A. D., & Elliot, A. J. (2015). Influence of conception risk and sociosexuality on female attraction to male red. Personality and Individual Differences, 87, 166–170. Read summary
For an audio version of this story, see the 8 September 2015 episode of The Psychology of Attractiveness Podcast.
