Andrew Elliot
Andrew Elliot is a psychologist at the University of Rochester, best known outside the field as first author, with Daniela Niesta, of "Romantic red" in 2008, whose opening experiment had twenty-seven participants. He later joined the authors of the failed replication on an adversarial meta-analysis of his own effect, which concluded that the true effect could be very small and potentially nonexistent in real-world circumstances. His own 2015 review in Frontiers in Psychology describes the literature on colour and psychological functioning as at a nascent stage of development and recommends patience and prudence about theory, findings and real-world application. That sentence has been public for a decade under the name the brand consultancies cite.
Who they are
Elliot's main body of work is on achievement motivation and approach-avoidance goals, where his standing is considerable and separate from this literature. The colour work is a smaller strand that became disproportionately famous.
The 2008 paper reports five experiments. Experiment 1 had fifteen participants in the red condition and twelve in the white, and produced an effect of d = 1.11. The others range from twenty-three to sixty-three participants. It is worth being precise about the numbers because the effect entered popular circulation as an established fact about human attraction, and its founding evidence is cells of a dozen.
The preregistered replication came from Gabrielle Lehmann and Robert Calin-Jageman in 2017, using the original materials, a preregistered analysis, a positive control and colour-blindness screening. Men rating women: d = 0.09, with 242 participants. Women rating men: d = -0.09, slightly the wrong way, with 360.
What happened next is the part that reflects well on him. Rather than issuing a rebuttal, Elliot joined Lehmann and Calin-Jageman on a meta-analysis of his own effect as middle author, an explicit adversarial collaboration. It pooled 2,961 participants for men rating women and found d = 0.26, and 2,739 for women rating men and found d = 0.13 with evidence of upward bias. Effect sizes had declined over time and were smaller in preregistered studies. Their joint conclusion was that the true effect could be very small and potentially nonexistent in real-world circumstances.
That is a rarer response than defending the finding, and this site records it as such.
Key papers
Elliot, A. J., & Niesta, D. (2008). "Romantic red: red enhances men's attraction to women." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95(5), 1150-1164.
Lehmann, G. K., & Calin-Jageman, R. J. (2017). "Is red really romantic?" Social Psychology, 48(3), 174-183.
Lehmann, G. K., Elliot, A. J., & Calin-Jageman, R. J. (2018). Evolutionary Psychology, 16(4). Meta-analysis, with Elliot as middle author.
Key ideas
A famous effect on twenty-seven people. The founding evidence was far thinner than the claim's circulation suggested.
Adversarial collaboration is the good outcome. Joining the critics on a meta-analysis of your own effect is the response the field should want.
Declining effect sizes are diagnostic. An effect that shrinks as designs improve is telling you where the original number came from.
Sources
- Elliot, A. J., & Niesta, D. (2008), "Romantic red: red enhances men's attraction to women," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95(5), 1150-1164.
- Lehmann, G. K., & Calin-Jageman, R. J. (2017), "Is red really romantic?", Social Psychology, 48(3), 174-183.
- Lehmann, G. K., Elliot, A. J., & Calin-Jageman, R. J. (2018), Evolutionary Psychology, 16(4). Meta-analysis, with Elliot as middle author.
- Elliot, A. J. (2015), review of colour and psychological functioning, Frontiers in Psychology. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00368
- Elliot, A. J., Maier, M. A., Moller, A. C., Friedman, R., & Meinhardt, J. (2007). The performance paper, with a stated mechanism, a falsifiable prediction and converging behavioural and cortical measures.
- Vault note: [[Andrew Elliot]], which records the update of 19 September 2026 and the sentence to quote.