““It led people to do worse without their knowledge,” said Elliot, one of the authors. In an academic context, the color red is traditionally associated with marking errors.įour experiments showed that just a brief perception of the color had a negative impact on the results. In their experiments, they wanted to find out if the perception of red would affect the results of IQ tests or major academic exams. Researchers at the University of Rochester found that the color red can also keep us from performing our best on tests. “We find that wearing red is consistently associated with higher probability of winning,” University of Durham researchers Russell Hill and Robert Barton wrote. And that red can be a deciding factor only among evenly matched competitors-but it still exists. Researchers are careful to point out that the effect is subtle at best. Similar tendencies were found in the 2004 European Soccer Championship. In 16 of 21 rounds, those wearing red won. In those sports, competitors are randomly assigned red or blue outfits, so no rigging is possible.Ĭompetitors in red outfits tend to perform (slightly) better at the Olympics, even when colors are randomly assigned. They examined boxing, taekwondo, Greco-Roman wrestling, and freestyle wrestling, basically all of the one-on-one sports. And by analyzing the results in the 2004 Olympics, researchers found that red also means dominance. There’s some truth to these interpretations, but can we translate these supposed associations into conversion lifts? Experiments with color usage Red can make you a winner…Īlmost universally, red means stop. Yellow brings with it sunshine and happiness. Green supposedly means nature, freshness, growth, and money.

It’s also said that, in North American culture, the color blue creates a feeling of trust, but also encourages appetite. People from tropical countries respond favorably to warm colors people from northern climates prefer cooler colors, and so on. Yellow symbolizes happiness and peace in Hinduism but represents sadness in Greece and jealousy in France. For example, white is the color of mourning and death in Chinese culture, but the color of death in Brazil is purple.

In different cultures, different colors mean contradicting things. There’s also a psychological side to colors-certain colors are associated with different qualities and emotions. Different colors can lift us up or bring us down.

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