Color and psychological functioning: The effect of red on performance attainment.
Elliot, Maier, Moller, Friedman and Meinhardt set out the case that red impairs performance on achievement tasks. The reasoning runs through context rather than through colour itself: in an achievement setting red is the colour associated with the danger of failure, so it should evoke avoidance motivation. Four experiments found that briefly perceiving red before an important test, an intelligence test among them, impaired performance, apparently outside participants' conscious awareness. Two further experiments went after the mechanism instead of the outcome, looking for avoidance in behaviour, through task choice, and in psychophysiological measures, through cortical activation, and reported evidence of it in both. The authors conclude that care must be taken over how red is used in achievement contexts. This publication treats the result as unsettled rather than established, a position its lead author's own later review supports.
Elliot, Maier, Moller, Friedman and Meinhardt set out the case that red impairs performance on achievement tasks. The reasoning runs through context rather than through colour itself: in an achievement setting red is the colour associated with the danger of failure, so it should evoke avoidance motivation. Four experiments found that briefly perceiving red before an important test, an intelligence test among them, impaired performance, apparently outside participants' conscious awareness. Two further experiments went after the mechanism instead of the outcome, looking for avoidance in behaviour, through task choice, and in psychophysiological measures, through cortical activation, and reported evidence of it in both. The authors conclude that care must be taken over how red is used in achievement contexts. This publication treats the result as unsettled rather than established, a position its lead author's own later review supports.
Written from the abstract, OpenAlex.
What our sources record
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Four experiments in which brief perception of red before an achievement task, including an IQ test, impaired performance, apparently outside awareness; two further experiments linked red to avoidance motivation through task choice and cortical activation. doi:10.1037/0096-3445.136.1.154
Where we use it
- What Red Actually Does, Why We Act
Reliability of this reference
The link below was matched against the publisher's record on title, first author and year, and all three agree.
The source
https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-3445.136.1.154
DOI: 10.1037/0096-3445.136.1.154