Every day as we move about the world, there are many subconscious forces that influence our decisions and the way people relate to us. Katie Silver reports on the ever-growing field of social psychology and what it tells us about ourselves.
As online dating websites and apps revolutionise the dating world, there’s increasing interest in knowing how to best maximise one’s chances of success in online romance.
Football coaches began to paint the visiting locker rooms that colour to calm their opposition down, and they swore that the opposition was weaker after spending a bit of time in this coloured cell.
While rigorous pilates and carefully-constructed selfies may help, science has come up with a proven, simple method to up one’s internet desirability: dress in red.
‘Wearing red reminds us of the flush of blood that comes to the face when you are interested in someone,’ says Adam Alter, professor of marketing and psychology at New York University's Stern School of Business.
A study by the University of Southern Brittany in France saw 64 women alter the colour of their t-shirts in their online dating profile photos every two weeks for a year. The photos in red generated 21 per cent of the total messages, compared with 14 to 16 per cent of messages when the women were wearing black, white, blue, yellow or green.
And it’s not just femme fatales; the findings also apply for men. ‘It reminds us of dominance, because in all sorts of lower order animals the colour red—very red feathers, a red face—is a signal of dominance,’ says Alter.
This finding forms part of an ever-growing field of social psychology which examines how subconscious forces shape our interactions in the world.
Read more: What sets us apart from the animals?
One of the iconic, early findings in this field centred on a shade of pink paint known as ‘drunk tank pink’.
'It’s a very bright bubblegummy Pepto-Bismol kind of pink,’ says Alter, who gave his book the same name.
Canadian psychologists in the 1960s and 1970s were seeking to investigate environmental factors that might improve how students behaved in classrooms.
They experimented by painting classrooms blue, green, and yellow. Almost by accident they included pink as well. The researchers found students in the pink rooms were calmer, better behaved and there was less truancy.
The findings spread and soon prison cells were being painted pink to pacify aggressive prisoners.
‘If they were aggressive, they put them in the cell for 15 minutes, and after that they were much calmer,’ Alter says.
‘Football coaches began to paint the visiting locker rooms that colour to calm their opposition down, and they swore that the opposition was weaker after spending a bit of time in this coloured cell.’
Listen: The much-maligned redhead
It’s not just colour: names have been shown to predict a person’s future career (opt for simple, masculine names); culture influences judgement of distance (Africans from tribal communities judge distance more accurately than those in the west); thinking back on our childhood makes us more act more ethically; and a hospital room with a view halves the need for pain medication.
Alter says that these subconscious forces are often hidden in the symbols, labels and names that we use in our everyday lives. He points to the example of the swastika.
‘The swastika for centuries was a religious symbol, it had only positive connotations, it was associated with peace and tranquillity.’
This changed dramatically after the Nazi Party’s adoption of the symbol in 1920. Now Alter studies how a quick glimpse of the swastika changes people’s behaviour; he has found that they become more aggressive, negative and judgemental.
There are also fascinating titbits of insight that have emerged through the study of unconscious priming, where a person is exposed to an image so quickly that they don’t remember it, but it later influences their behaviour.
For example, researchers subliminally exposed participants in one study to either a black or white face for a few milliseconds and then asked them to judge whether certain images were of weapons. Those participants who saw white faces took a very long time, while those exposed to a black person were much quicker, according to Alter.
‘The idea is that when you are exposed to black people, because there are certain associations in the culture with black people and violence, at least in the US, you are much more primed already to see negativity or to see weapons.’
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Listen to All in the Mind to discover the hidden forces that shape our thoughts, feelings and behaviour.
Priming, however, has attracted criticism from high places.
Nobel Prize-winning psychologist and author of Thinking, Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman has said that the inability to replicate many priming studies points to an impending 'train wreck' in social psychology.
‘The basic theory of priming is very sound, but researchers have taken it a long way from that basic theory,’ says Alter, ridiculing research which found holding a warm cup of coffee makes someone a warmer person.
The problem is, sexy research sells: ‘The effects that people talk about most are the ones that are most eye-catching.’
‘The job of social psychology now is to rein that in a little bit and be a little bit more careful about how it runs its studies.’
An exploration of all things mental, All in the Mind is about the brain and behaviour, and the fascinating connections between them.
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