Wearing red makes you look more aggressive, dominant

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – @ParkstBrett

If you’re a guy about to head out to the basketball court for an afternoon pick-up game, consider first throwing on a red shirt.

According to new research in the journal Biology Letters, men wearing red were seen as more aggressive, angry, and even dominant compared to men wearing other colors.

“We know that the color red has an effect on the human brain,” study author Diana Wiedemann, an anthropologist at Durham University in the United Kingdom, said in a statement. “This is embedded in our culture, for example the idea of wearing a red tie – known as a ‘power tie’ – for business, or issuing a red alert.”

The study team noted that the color red often indicates aggression in nature. For example, people will often become red-faced while they are angry and this “warning” is believed to be handed down from our historical ancestors. In some wildlife species, reddish colors may be exhibited by competing males trying to dominate each other to win the right to mate with females, the researchers noted.

Think carefully about social situations

In the study, researchers started by recruiting 50 males and 50 females. Participants were shown a series of images of men that were digitally altered so they appeared to be wearing a different colored t-shirt in each photo. Participants were asked to score them on a scale of 1 to 7 for both aggression and dominance.

The participants were also instructed to determine the mental state of the man in each picture. Volunteers tended to select “angry” for those sporting a red shirt, other choices included happy, frightened and neutral. The male participants also tended to rate men wearing red as ‘dominant’, while female participant did not report that perception.

“The implications of our research are that people may wish to think carefully about wearing red in social situations and perhaps important meetings, such as job interviews,” said Wiedemann. “Being perceived as aggressive or dominant may be an advantage in some circumstances but a disadvantage in others, for example where teamwork or trustworthiness is important.”

The researchers noted that they only studied the effects of men wearing red to restrict the number of variables, adding that an analysis would have been much more complex if images of both sexes wearing red and other colors were used.

The team said they may investigate perceptions of women wearing red in future research.

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