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Page: << Prev | 1 | 2 While some colors may help athletes perform better, the researchers wrote, "referees are responsible for the advantage conveyed to athletes who wear red."
But red may not always be a good color for athletes. For example, they may sway referees in soccer to call fouls on players. "One can speculate that the red-clothed players are associated not only with more dominance but also with more aggressiveness, and in ambiguous foul decisions this could be a disadvantage," Hagemann said.
The study findings are published in the August issue of the journal Psychological Science.
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Andrew Elliot, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester who has researched the effects of color, said the study authors erred by not taking into account other aspects of color, such as hue and brightness. These factors could all have played a role in how the officials perceived the colors, he said.
Elliot added that the color red actually seems to intimidate players on opposite teams, instead of boosting the performance of athletes. In some research, "the people in blue are seeing red and they're doing worse. It's not that wearing red leads to better performance," he said.
Why might red be intimidating? People's experiences with the color -- such as red marks on student papers in school or the red of a stop sign -- may affect how the color is perceived, Elliot said. People could then learn to see red as a sign of failure or of potential danger, he said.
"These are extremely basic processes and hard to overcome," he said.
More information
Learn more about how colors can affect moods at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania.
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