If a new study is any guide, the color red can make people’s work more accurate, and blue can make people more creative.
In the study, researchers at the University of British Columbia conducted tests with 600 people to determine whether cognitive performance varied when people saw red or blue.
The question of whether color can color performance or emotions has fascinated scientists, not to mention advertisers, sports teams and restaurateurs.
In a study on Olympic uniforms, anthropologists at Durham University in England found that evenly matched athletes in the 2004 Games who wore red in boxing, tae kwon do, Greco-Roman wrestling and freestyle wrestling defeated those wearing blue 60 percent of the time. The researchers suggested that red, for athletes as for animals, subconsciously symbolizes dominance.
Effects that were perhaps similarly primal were revealed in a 2008 study led by Andrew Elliot of the University of Rochester. Men considered women shown in photographs with red backgrounds or wearing red shirts more attractive than women with other colors, although not necessarily more likeable or intelligent.
Then there was the cocktail party study, in which a group of interior designers, architects and corporate color scientists built model rooms decorated as bars in red, blue or yellow. They found that more people chose the yellow and red rooms, but that partygoers in the blue room stayed longer. Red and yellow guests were more social and active. And while red guests reported feeling hungrier and thirstier than others, yellow guests ate twice as much.
“When you feel that the situation you are in is problematic,” said Norbert Schwarz, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, “you are more likely to pay attention to detail, which helps you with processing tasks but interferes with creative types of things.”
By contrast, Dr. Schwarz said, “people in a happy mood are more creative and less analytic.”
Many people link red to problematic things, like emergencies or X’s on failing tests, experts say. Such “associations to red stop, fire, alarm, warning can be activated without a person’s awareness, and then influence what they are thinking about or doing,” said John A. Bargh, a psychology professor at Yale University. “Blue seems a weaker effect than red, but blue skies, blue water are calm and positive, and so that effect makes sense too.”
Still, Dr. Schwarz cautioned, color effects may be unreliable or inconsequential.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/06/science/06color.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink