Alexander Schauss

Who they are

The sources read for this site describe Alexander Schauss in two overlapping ways, and this page does not claim they are the same current role. Wikipedia's account of Baker-Miller pink describes him as director of the American Institute for Biosocial Research in Tacoma, Washington, and as someone who studied psychological and physiological responses to pink from the late 1960s after reading the work of Max Lüscher. An author page at Natural Medicine Journal lists an Alexander Schauss with a PhD as CEO and senior director of research at AIBMR Life Sciences, a Seattle-based consultancy, with advisory roles at the US National Institutes of Health and the US Pharmacopeial Convention. It gives no dates, and this site has not confirmed that the two descriptions refer to one continuous career.

What the record does support is his place in the pink story. Wikipedia reports early tests in 1978 in which he observed that colour affected muscle strength and the cardiovascular system, and a self-experiment with a research assistant, John Ott, that led him to label one shade P-618. It credits him with persuading the directors of a naval correctional institute in Seattle to paint confinement cells in that shade in 1979, and says the shade was named after the two directors, Baker and Miller. That account rests on secondary sources, and the vault's own account of the Seattle cell comes from Adam Alter's Drunk Tank Pink, which does not give a comparison cell or any measure beyond what staff observed.

Key papers

Schauss, A. G. (1979). Two experiments on pink and strength, published in the final 1979 issue of the Journal of Orthomolecular Psychiatry. Known on this site only as Alter (2013) describes them: in the first, 153 men looked at a pink card for a minute and all but two were judged weaker afterwards, and in the second, 38 men were measured on a dynamometer and none was an exception. The original was not read.

Pellegrini, R. J., Schauss, A. G., & Miller, M. E. (1981). 'Room Color and Aggression in a Criminal Detention Holding Cell: A Test of the "Tranquilizing Pink" Hypothesis.' Journal of Orthomolecular Psychiatry, 10(3), 174-181. The strip-search room of a Santa Clara County detention facility, about 13 feet 4 inches by 15 feet 6 inches, was repainted from pale blue to hot pink. The study compared aggressive encounters between officers and detainees in the year before and the year after. Incidents fell in the first month, then rose and peaked in the second half of the pink year, and the authors read the early fall as possibly an artefact of the intervention. The annotation held by the National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJ 89729) concludes that overall rates differed little. Read at the level of the abstract and annotation.

Schauss, A. G. (1981). 'Application of behavioral photobiology to human aggression: Baker-Miller pink.' International Journal of Biosocial Research, 2, 25-27. Listed in Wikipedia's account of Baker-Miller pink and not read for this site.

Key ideas

The inference from strength to aggression. The claim that reached prisons ran in two steps: looking at the shade weakens a person's physical strength, and a person who is physically weaker is less able to be aggressive. Oliver Genschow and colleagues, in the abstract of their 2015 trial, describe the practice of painting cells in this colour as resting on findings more than thirty years old that suggested the colour weakens physical strength and so reduces aggression. The second step has never been tested directly in the studies read for this site.

What Alter's endnote concedes. In Drunk Tank Pink, Alter's endnote on page 229 says that Schauss continued to test the effect, sometimes but not always finding support, and prints the papers in two columns, supporting and not. The 1981 county paper that Schauss co-wrote is in the non-supporting column. The body of the book says only that by the late 1990s some researchers found weaker evidence for the original effect.

A paper that reports its own doubt. The 1981 county study is notable for what its authors said about their own result. They did not present the early fall in incidents as a success. They offered it as a possible artefact of the intervention, the sort of short-lived change that follows when something in a room is visibly altered, and they noted that the room was far larger than the holding rooms in facilities that had reported success. That is a more cautious reading than the one that travelled.

What the later tests found. The 2015 randomised trial in Swiss detention, 59 men assigned at random to pink or white cells, found aggression fell in both and the colour made no difference at any point. A sheriff's intake facility in California reported improvement in a pink room among 50 aggressive detainees in 1981, in a study its own summary describes as lacking a control group. Neither result shows that pink never calms anyone anywhere. The controlled one found no effect, and the supportive one cannot separate the colour from the room.

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