All’s Fair in Love in War — Except When Wearing Red
Though love and aggression may seem opposite, their associations with the color red make sense from an evolutionary perspective. Researchers have found that in some non-human species, a male’s dominance — and thus ability to mate successfully — can be increased by attaching red stimuli. This was demonstrated in a 1987 experiment in which male zebra finches assigned to wear red leg bands exhibited more behavioral dominance than those wearing light green.
As color is thought to influence not just animal mood but human mood as well, University of Durham researchers Russell Hill and Robert Barton set out to see if this effect translated into a common display of human dominance: sports.
The 2004 Olympics proved to be ripe for studying, with competitors in boxing, taekwondo, Graeco-Roman wrestling, and freestyle wrestling all randomly assigned either red or blue outfits. In all four combat sports and across all weight divisions, Hill and Barton found a consistent and statistically significant pattern, in which contestants wearing red won more fights. Red seemed to only give an edge in closely matched competitions, indicating that “artificial colours may influence the outcome of physical contests in humans,” they wrote in Nature.
There have since been several follow-up studies trying to replicate these results in different contexts.
Hill and Barton performed another study, published in the Journal of Sports Sciences in 2007, analyzing long-term performance of red-wearing English soccer teams. They found red teams had the best home record across all league divisions over several decades. Teams playing in white performed better than those playing in yellow, casting doubt on the notion that red’s winning effects manifest merely in teams that wear a color. This study seemed to support the findings of Hill and Barton’s Olympics study, but this time for team sports.
Researchers from Romania and Denmark chose to study the effects of wearing red in virtual competition. By analyzing data from a 2004 multiplayer first-person-shooter tournament, they found that teams playing characters wearing red won more than teams in blue. These findings also seemed to confirm the wearing red effect in team sports, though this time with virtual uniforms.
Another group of researchers wanted to see if Hill and Barton’s findings were due to the color red distracting men in competition. Both men and women underwent Stroop tests and were told they would be ranked for this experiment. In a Stroop test, the subject must name the color of a word while disregarding its meaning. The researchers found men had longer response times for the red stimuli, such as “BLUE” in red ink, but that this distractor effect was not apparent in women. This finding suggests that “seeing red” can distract men through a “psychological rather than a perceptual mechanism,” by associating red with dominance in competition, the researchers wrote in Evolution and Human Behavior.
While the corroboration of Hill and Barton’s findings over various types of competition provides a compelling case for red’s winning effect, these results are not necessarily consistent across the actual sports world. As Barton acknowledged to The New York Times when his study was published, “All scientific results are a bit provisional.” As sports history has shown, individuals or teams in red do not always hold the upper hand.
Sources:
doi: 10.1098/rspb.1997.0151
doi: 10.1089/cpb.2007.0122
