Does She Come in Red?
13th April 2009
Who’s more attractive?
The answer depends on one key variable: Your sex. If you are a male, then you really like the woman on red compared to the (same) woman on blue, white, gray, or green. If you are a female, it doesn’t matter.
At least this is true according to a recent study by Andrew J. Elliot and Daniela Niesta entitled “Romantic Red: Red Enhances Men’s Attraction to Women” as published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP) 2008, Vol. 95, No. 5, 1150–1164. They conducted five simple studies that merely manipulated the color of the background for a standard head and shoulders shot of a person. Four of the five studies involved men looking at a picture of a the same woman. One study used a sample of women as a control. In all studies the participants were randomly assigned to look at only one picture and in all studies there were only two conditions, red or another color (white, gray, green or blue). After viewing the one picture each participant provided a self reported “attitude” score (attractiveness, sexual desirablility, and others).
In all five studies, men always rated the same woman more positively when her picture appeared against a red background. (With women, the rating did not vary – a girl is a girl is a girl to other girls in this application.) What surprised me was the size of the effect.
Expressed as the Windowpane, the effect ranged from a high of 75/25 to a low of 62/38 with an average across all five of 68/32, or a strong medium effect.
A couple of important observations. First, red works with men looking at women. That’s all. It says nothing about red cars or red hats or red banners or anything else. This effect is the Romantic Red effect and it’s about boys looking at girls. Second, red appears to have no effect for women looking at women. Women might prefer red cars or red hats or red banners, but that’s another study. Third, this appears to me to be a straightforward application of the Ding-Dong or classical conditioning. In Western culture, the color red has a very long and strong association with attraction. It’s no mistake that the classic pinup poster (adult advisory) of Marilyn Monroe puts her on a red background.
Finally, we don’t know if women looking at men might respond the same way. But just in case, I’ll leave you with this.
Interestingly, this picture of me was taken at Zola, the restaurant in Washington DC. They seated Melanie and me in a booth with this dark red drape behind us and all the other booths in the room were likewise decorated. Not all the Zola rooms had this treatment, and if memory serves me correctly every table in our room had both men and women. There were no tables of just men or just women. Perhaps Zola’s been reading my work!