![]() ![]() Genschow’s team had offered their volunteers a plate of pretzels, and told them to eat as many as they felt they needed to make a judgement about the taste. The same team also raised questions about another landmark finding, originally conducted by Oliver Genschow at the University of Basel in Switzerland. In this new, bigger study, of 263 volunteers, background colour made no difference. The initial study comprised just 69 people. When another team tried to replicate the anagram part of the study with a larger group of people in 2014, the effect of colour disappeared. In any case, question marks are now hanging over the discovery itself. In an office or a classroom you might want to think creatively some of the time and pay attention to detail at others. For example, they wondered whether walls should be painted different colours depending on the task at hand – red for a team looking at the side effects of a new drug, for example, or blue for a room for creative brainstorming. ![]() The team even speculated about the practical uses of their findings. The subjects tended to solve the avoidance words faster if they were presented on a red background, and the approach words more quickly if they were presented on a blue background – suggesting that the colours and behaviours were associated in their minds. To test this idea, the researchers then asked the volunteers to solve anagrams of different words – relating to either avoidance or approach behaviours. The authors speculated that red signalled "avoidance" and so they were more careful, while blue motivated the opposite: an "approach" behaviour that encouraged them to be freer with their thinking, resulting in more creativity. With a red screen people did better on tests of memory and proof-reading, tasks requiring attention to detail, but when the screen was blue they did better on creative tasks, such as thinking of as many uses as possible for a single brick. They sat their participants at computer screens coloured blue, red or “neutral” and tested them on various tasks. It is true that people do make different associations with different colours, but whether this translates into behaving in a certain way or succeeding at a particular task is a different question.Īfter so many mixed results in the past, in 2009 researchers at the University of British Columbia tried to clarify the situation once and for all. Of course there will always be exceptions – the comment from the teacher saying “well done” is also written in red and raspberries are red, but perfectly edible. Blue meanwhile is more likely to be associated with calmer situations like staring at the sea or marvelling at a big blue expanse of sky. It’s been suggested that a school career spent reading your teacher’s red writing circling your mistakes forever makes you link red with danger and this is underlined by the fact that poisonous fruits are often red. The idea is that if you repeatedly have a particular experience surrounded by a certain colour, then you eventually begin to associate that colour with the way you were feeling or behaving. ![]() The mechanism most often cited is conditioning. Some studies have found that people do better on cognitive tasks when faced with red rather than blue or green others show the opposite. Red is the colour that gets studied most often and tends to be compared with either blue or green. When it comes to scientific research, the results are mixed and at times contested. But do they really change our behaviour in the ways that we assume? The idea that red wakes us up or blue calms us down is deeply engrained in Western culture - to the point that many consider it a fact. We might think we know which colours do what. Doctors’ surgeries are painted white to give us that sense of clinical cleanliness, fast food shops are red or yellow and some prison cells are painted pink in the hope of reducing aggression. We pore over paint charts and bring home tester pots. We can spend hours choosing the right paint colour for a room to create just the mood we want. ![]()
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