Black and white. Black has very strong associations with aggression and dominance, while white has, once again, very strong associations with submission, peacefulness and honesty. We are daytime animals, for most of us, darkness is danger time. So if you get together a group of men and give them all black outfits and give them big guns, they will be very intimidating, very dangerously looking people. There's a Russian expression which says, they fear me, therefore they respect me. And one group of researchers set out to investigate this particular relationships. And as you can see from the bar chart, men wearing black are perceived as much more aggressive compared to men wearing grey. And this is also true to certain extent about respectability. Men wearing black are deemed as slightly more respectable looking compared to men wearing grey. This is not true for women, partially true for women. Females wearing black are not perceived as aggressive at all, however they are perceived slightly more respectable than females wearing gryy. So, aggression and status. Apple used to have just black and white iPhones to signal status of the owners. And then they introduced a budget line and it was, of course, very colorful, bright. And the message here is I think very clear, black, silver and gold is reserved for the high status fellows while those colors are for much cheaper models. And I think we've discussed this effect before, you need a lot colors if you sell to children and you don't need all that many color if you sell to adults. I don't think you will have any trouble understanding which restaurant is more pricey, even if you don't know what McDonald's or Chez Panisse stands for. The restaurant on the right is obviously much more expensive. So black and white. Black means aggression, dominance, danger. White means honesty, loyalty, peacefulness, honesty. And black and white together signal status and, to some extent, respect. So can we have a black and white presentation, without any colors that is? And the answer is yes, if you are presenting to a high status audience or if you perceive yourself as a high status individual. In that case, yes, you probably can have black and white presentation. Red, the next color is red. Red is very close to black. This is the first abstract color to appear in language and meanings of red are very close to meanings of black. Generally it means danger and avoidance. For men, it would mean aggression and dominance. For females, it means fertility. And it is detrimental to complex cognitive tasks, and I will explain later what that means. Red is very. So we know that red means stop, and this is a biological, not a psychological effect. There were experiments with monkeys, and if you are a researcher wearing either green or blue t-shirt, the monkey wouldn't care. It will take a sliced piece of apple from you anyway. However, if you're wearing red, some monkeys would resist. They will prefer researchers wearing green or blue colored t-shirts. They do not take slice pieces of apple from researchers wearing red t-shirts. So even monkey knows that red means stop and humans use that to black and white outfit and red power tie, they call it. It's usually either red or yellow. There was a widely publicized research about 2004 Olympics, where athletes wearing red outfits seemed to win more matches in boxing, Taekwondo, Greco-Roman wrestling and freestyle wrestling. However, this research was flawed. I'm only talking about this because this is in every other book on colors. Apparently the distribution of outfits was not entirely random, so this effect does not hold for any other Olympics, other than 2004, and this was just some statistical fluke. However, there were other experiments, and, as you can see, especially, for men wearing red, they are perceived as much more aggressive, and much more dominant, compared to people wearing blue or grey outfits. So if you are a sports team wearing red to intimidate your opponents would probably make a lot of sense. The same doesn't work for women, though the widely held belief that for females red doesn't mean aggression but it means fertility, it means sex. A few years back there were experiments where subjects were presented with photographs of the same female on either white or green or this example red background. And the female on red was judged as 10% more attractive, approximately 10% more attractive. Men expressed more desire to ask her out for a date, more desire to spend money, etc. However, this experiment doesn't replicate well either. There's a lot of failed research in psychology. So at the moment it is believed that objectively the color red has no effect on sexual. So we do not know if that works for the audience but we do know that this is what women are trying to say. Women's display of the color red depends on the attractiveness of an anticipated interaction partner, which means that if she goes on dates with a guy she's romantically interested in, she is more likely to wear red. So to a certain extent, yes red signals sex, even though this is probably a cultural not a biological effect. And one final beat, if you give students tasks on different colored background paper, they will solve simple detail-oriented tasks on red paper better than on blue paper or dark grey paper. However, for a difficult detail-oriented tasks or for creative tasks, blue prevails. Blue is much more complex, much more sophisticated. I think I need to put quotes around the word sophisticated here. So, red is primitive, red is detrimental to complex, cognitive tasks. So once again, red is sexual, very close to black, aggressive, dominant and perhaps not very bright. And this is where people ask me, well, Alexi, why did you choose red as your primary color? And let me remind you about the power of context. For me, I use a very formal old style, safe typeface and it was only fair to pair it with red, because red is such a traditional companion color in books. So as far as I'm concerned, red means sophistication. Red means old books. Red means culture. Red means enlightened.
