What is colour-in-context theory?
A colour has no fixed effect, only the meaning it carries where it is seen. What a walking experiment, an attention study and two replications show.
Answer to the question
What is colour-in-context theory?
Colour-in-context theory holds that a colour has no fixed effect: its influence on feeling, thinking and behaviour depends on the meaning it carries in the setting where it is seen. In one walking experiment, red sped people toward a dating interview and slowed them toward an intelligence test, while some single-setting colour effects have not been reproduced.
Key takeaways
- Colour-in-context theory, proposed by Andrew Elliot and Markus Maier, holds that a colour carries the meaning it has acquired in the setting where it is seen, so its effect can change with the setting.
- In a walking experiment, red sped participants toward a dating interview and slowed them toward an intelligence interview, while blue showed no such pattern (Meier and colleagues, 2012).
- Red captured and held attention in emotional conditions but not in neutral ones in a dot-probe study with brain recording (Kuniecki and colleagues, 2015).
- A direct replication of one red and blue anagram experiment, with 263 students after exclusions, found no interaction (Steele, 2014).
- Adam Alter's Drunk Tank Pink records that tests of the pink claim found support some of the time, which is the kind of record a context-based account is built to explain.
Adam Alter's Drunk Tank Pink treats a pink holding cell as the emblem of an idea, that the colours around us steer behaviour unnoticed. His endnotes record that tests of the pink claim found support some of the time. Colour-in-context theory makes sense of that record by refusing the simple claim: a colour carries the meaning it has picked up where it is seen.
What does colour-in-context theory predict about the effect of red?
Andrew Elliot and Markus Maier built colour-in-context theory on two linked ideas. Colours acquire meaning, partly through biology and partly through learning: red goes with danger and anger in some settings and with passion in others. And that meaning shapes feeling, thinking and behaviour in relation to the situation a person is in. Their 2014 review in the Annual Review of Psychology sets out the account and concludes that colour can carry meaning and can influence affect, cognition and behaviour, while noting that boundary conditions and generalisation to real-world settings still need study before firm practical recommendations are justified.
The prediction that follows from colour-in-context theory is distinctive. If meaning depends on context, a colour should be able to reverse its effect when the context changes. Red can then push one way at a desk and the other way at a dinner table. That is a stronger test than asking whether red raises or lowers something in general, and a harder one to pass, because a theory that allows opposite outcomes has to say in advance which setting produces which.
The usual statement ties red to avoidance in achievement settings, where it has been linked to weaker performance, and to approach in romantic settings, where it has been linked to higher attractiveness ratings. Blue usually serves as the comparison colour.
Alter's book shows why colour-in-context theory was needed. Colour findings accumulate one at a time, each a small story about what a colour does, and a reader has no way to tell which story will travel. Colour-in-context theory supplies the principle that says when to expect an effect and when not to. The pink cell story is a good illustration of a claim with no setting attached: the proposal was that a shade calms whoever sees it and wherever they see it, and the later record answered that it sometimes did and sometimes did not. A theory that names the setting turns that mixed record into a question about which settings differ.
Where does the evidence support what the theory predicts?
The cleanest test puts both settings inside one experiment. Brian Meier and colleagues sent participants to an interview that was framed as being about dating or about intelligence, with red or blue present in the setting. Red sped up walking toward the dating interview and slowed it toward the intelligence interview, while blue showed no such pattern. The authors present it as the first direct evidence in humans that context moderates red's approach and avoidance effects, and the colour stayed constant while the direction changed.
Attention gives a second line of support. Michał Kuniecki and colleagues recorded brain responses while people did a dot-probe task with red images and found that red captured and held attention in emotional conditions but not in neutral ones. The behavioural effects were weaker, though red still affected reaction times. The authors read the pattern as context changing how red influences attention, which is the claim of colour-in-context theory stated at the level of perception.
Two earlier papers fit colour-in-context theory from the performance side. Ravi Mehta and Rui Zhu reported that red induced mainly an avoidance motivation and improved performance on a detail-oriented task, while blue improved performance on a creative task, with further studies in product design and in the evaluation of persuasive messages and effects that occurred outside conscious awareness.
Stephanie Lichtenfeld and colleagues found in four experiments that a brief glimpse of green before a creativity task improved creative performance against both achromatic and chromatic comparison colours, with no change in reported mood. Shop interiors raise the same question about settings, as in Does Shop Colour Keep People Longer, where the colour and the room are hard to pull apart.
Where does the evidence for the theory hold less firmly?
Some of the single-setting effects have been harder to reproduce. Kenneth Steele ran a direct replication of one experiment from the Mehta and Zhu paper, which asked whether red and blue backgrounds change how quickly people solve anagrams of words tied to avoidance or approach. With 263 students after exclusions, the replication found no such interaction, and the colour effects were very small.
The sample was large enough to detect a small effect, so that particular anagram result stands unsettled, while the broader question of how colour and motivation relate stays open. Colour-in-context theory does not depend on either result, because it concerns what moves an effect from one setting to the next and not any single effect.
Green gives a similar pattern. Lichtenfeld and colleagues later compared green with red on a workspace wall and found no influence on creativity. They caution that null results need careful interpretation and warn against real-world recommendations before a firm empirical base exists. A glimpse before a task and a colour on the wall for an extended time are different contexts, which fits the logic of colour-in-context theory and hands later studies a clear variable to test.
Context does the same work outside the laboratory. The sorting of red's famous predictions into those that held and those that did not is the subject of What Red Actually Does, and What is the red sneakers effect shows a signal read as status or as a mistake depending on whether the observer knows the setting. For colour liking, What is ecological valence theory describes a rival account, in which preference follows feelings about the objects that share a colour.
How do the six studies line up against each other?
Six studies, one question: did the colour act alike everywhere?
| Study | Setting tested | Reported result |
|---|---|---|
| Meier and colleagues, 2012 | Walking toward a dating or an intelligence interview | Red sped walking in one setting and slowed it in the other; blue showed no pattern |
| Kuniecki and colleagues, 2015 | Dot-probe task with emotional and neutral images | Red captured and held attention in emotional conditions only |
| Mehta and Zhu, 2009 | Detail-oriented and creative tasks | Red helped detail work; blue helped creative work |
| Steele, 2014 | Anagram solving with red or blue backgrounds | A direct replication with 263 students found no interaction |
| Lichtenfeld and colleagues, 2012 | Creativity task after a brief glimpse of green | Creative performance improved |
| Lichtenfeld and colleagues, 2018 | Green or red on a workspace wall | No influence on creativity |
One reading of the right-hand column is that effects tied to a clearly defined situation, such as the two interviews or the emotional images, are the ones colour-in-context theory predicts best, while effects claimed for a colour in general have been harder to reproduce. In the walking study the interviewer's colour never changed, yet the direction of the walk followed the kind of interview that lay ahead, which is the pattern the theory exists to describe.
Common questions
What is colour-in-context theory?
It is the proposal by Andrew Elliot and Markus Maier that a colour has no fixed effect. Its influence on feeling, thinking and behaviour depends on the meaning it carries in the setting where it is seen.
Does red always make people avoid things?
No. In the walking experiment, red slowed people heading to an intelligence interview and sped them toward a dating interview, so the direction depended on the setting.
Have the colour studies been reproduced?
Results differ. A direct replication of one red and blue anagram experiment with 263 students found no interaction, and a workspace-wall test found no influence of green on creativity, while the walking and attention studies fit the theory.
Can a business use colour-in-context theory to choose colours?
The authors of the 2014 review say boundary conditions and real-world generalisation need more study before firm practical recommendations are justified, so the theory is best used to ask which setting a colour will be seen in.
Sources
Alter, A. Drunk Tank Pink. Seed book; vault hub Books/Drunk Tank Pink.
Meier, B. P., D'Agostino, P. R., Elliot, A. J., Maier, M. A., & Wilkowski, B. M. (2012). Color in context: Psychological context moderates the influence of red on approach- and avoidance-motivated behavior. PLoS ONE, 7(7), e40333. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0040333 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0040333
Kuniecki, M., Pilarczyk, J., & Wichary, S. (2015). The color red attracts attention in an emotional context. An ERP study. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 9, 212. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2015.00212 https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2015.00212
Mehta, R., & Zhu, R. (2009). Blue or red? Exploring the effect of color on cognitive task performances. Science, 323(5918), 1226-1229. doi:10.1126/science.1169144 https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1169144
Steele, K. M. (2014). Failure to replicate the Mehta and Zhu (2009) color-priming effect on anagram solution times. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 21(3), 771-776. doi:10.3758/s13423-013-0548-3 https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-013-0548-3
Lichtenfeld, S., Elliot, A. J., Maier, M. A., & Pekrun, R. (2012). Fertile green: Green facilitates creative performance. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(6). doi:10.1177/0146167212436611 https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167212436611
Lichtenfeld, S., Maier, M. A., Buechner, V. L., & Elliot, A. J. (2018). Ambient green and creativity. Creativity Research Journal, 30(3). doi:10.1080/10400419.2018.1488197 https://doi.org/10.1080/10400419.2018.1488197
Elliot, A. J., & Maier, M. A. (2014). Color psychology: Effects of perceiving color on psychological functioning in humans. Annual Review of Psychology, 65(1), 95-120. doi:10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115035 https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115035