We've done a bunch of research here at the University of Rochester in the past looking
at how men perceive women in red.
And we found that men perceive women in red as particularly attractive and the reason
why they find them attractive is because they perceive them as sexually available or sexually
interested.
So we wanted to take this line of research a step further and see how women perceive
other women in red.
So in our experiments we showed women photographs of other women and we had manipulated the
clothing color of the women in those photographs to where the pictures were identical.
The only thing that was different was the color and we asked women various questions
about them.
So, how interested in sex does this person seem?
How flirtatious is she?
How seductive is she?
And we find that the exact same person, when wearing red, relative to white or green, is
perceived as much more sexually interested and available.
We also found that women were likely to insult these other women when wearing red, specifically
on topics regarding their sexual fidelities.
There likely to say, for example, this woman probably can't stay loyal to just one man
at a time.
She probably cheats on men and then very interestingly we recruited women who were in committed romantic
relationships and we asked them how likely they'd be to introduce their partner to a
women in red versus green.
How likely to let their partner spend time alone with her and we find that women are
much less likely to have their man anywhere near a women in red, essentially.
The big picture take away is that color is much more than meets the eye and this is something
that we take for granted all the time so we go through life thinking that color is just
here for our visual pleasure but really color can convey information to people that regardless
of our intentions, whether or not we want it to, people can pick up on color as a cue
to certain things and that may effect on how people view us.
It may affect how people treat us and this kind of information is really handy to have
when navigating the social world.