A few years ago, prisons in Europe and North America were gripped by an unusual trend.
They started painting the cell walls pink.
It has become so common that in 2014, one in five prisons and police stations in Switzerland had at least one holding cell painted bright pink.
The decor was not designed as an aesthetic choice or to make the millennial generation of criminals feel comfortable, but to apply a famous scientific study from the seventies.
Then researcher Alexander Schaus convinced the Navy Penitentiary to paint several detention cells pink, theorizing from his own experiments that the color could positively affect the behavior of the residents, softening and calming their aggression.
The results he achieved suggested he was right - a memo written by the Naval Personnel Bureau stated that detainees needed only 15 minutes of exposure to the pink cell for their aggressive behavior and potential for violence to decrease.
Tests at other detention centers seemed to confirm his findings, and once the shade he used was published in 1979 and 1981—initially made using 473 milliliters of semi-gloss red exterior paint with 4.546 milliliters of pure white latex paint—it began to spread en masse. is used for its mood-altering properties in prisons around the world.
- Why your favorite color is probably blue
- Do you know yourself as well as you think?
- Imagine being able to smell a movie or series
This shade of pink—officially named P-618, but Schaus called it Baker-Miller pink after the directors of the Naval Detention Center where it was first tested—became known by various names around the world where it was used, from "sober cell pink " to "soothing pink".
There's just one problem: Schaus's results have never been successfully replicated.
"There was a 2015 study, done properly under controlled conditions, that found no evidence that the color pink reduced aggression," says Domisel Jonauskaite, a color researcher at the University of Vienna, Austria.
A study from the Justisvolzugsanstalt Poschwiss in Switzerland of 59 male prisoners showed that there was no difference between white and pink prison cells when it came to the level of inmate aggression.
Even if the calming effect of pink from the sobering cell is questioned, the readiness with which it was adopted speaks to something deep in the human psyche when it comes to the power of color.
And that might not even be wrong - there's evidence that colors can influence our behavior in some surprising ways without us even realizing it.
For example, some colors can be used to prompt us to take action: just look at the research comparing the number of times a hitchhiker whose car broke down was picked up by other passing cars.
When the tipped passenger, who was actually played by a member of the research team, wore a red shirt, she was picked up much more often than when she wore a shirt of any other color.
Red has been shown to evoke more immediate emotional reactions, although this may be due to something known as the Berlin-Kaye theory, which was developed from the work of a pair of American scientists in the XNUMXs.
Simply put, they found that red is always the third color whose name occurs in the nearly 100 languages they studied, right after white and black.
The longer the word for red was in use, the greater the number of associations, meanings and nuances it carries.
In this way, the color itself achieves a stronger effect.
On the other hand, color can also be used to demoralize.
One of the locker rooms at the University of Iowa football stadium was infamously painted pink, including the restrooms, in an attempt to dampen the fighting spirit of the visiting team - based on Schaus's experiments.
Exactly how effective this was is still an open question.
The statistics seem to indicate that while the pink locker room was in use, the Iowa Hawkeyes had an above-average home win rate, but there could be many other reasons for that performance (they could simply be a better team, for example ).
Much of the research on how color affects human behavior is controversial, though.
Some studies suggest that they can affect everything from our mood and our feelings to how fast our heart beats and even our physical strength.
Bright shades of red, for example, have been shown to lead to higher states of arousal and can even ward off sleepiness.
Experiments also suggest that monotonous tasks such as proofreading can be accomplished more efficiently in red offices, while creative tasks such as essay writing are better done in blue rooms.
But other jobs have shown that red and blue can be distracting while someone is trying to do something.
Still others suggest that certain personality types, such as introverts, may be more susceptible to external influences such as the color of their surroundings.
These contradictions have led some researchers to caution against giving too much weight to claims about the therapeutic and psychological properties of different colors, arguing that there is still insufficient evidence to support them.
- When to trust instinct
- The surprising positives of being in a bad mood
- The medical power of hypnosis
But there are some areas where colors have been shown to have an obvious effect on our brains.
For example, they can affect the way we experience our own senses, such as the sense of taste for example, or even our preferences in music.
One of the things that red seems to evoke quite consistently is sweetness.
One study conducted on more than 5.300 people from all over the world showed that red colored drinks will most often be experienced as the sweetest, regardless of the origin of the participants in the experiment.
Marie Wright, chief flavor scientist at ADM Nutrition, a multinational food and beverage company, recalls one particular test of a strawberry flavored product the company designed.
Volunteers had trouble recognizing changes in sweetness while testing flavors.
But when Wright and her colleagues increased the red color of the liquid instead of increasing the amount of sugar in it, participants began to report that it tasted sweeter.
"We found that you can make something seem sweeter if it's a brighter color," Wright says.
"Just like a bright red apple: before you bite into it, you expect it to be sweeter."
She says that increasing the intensity of a color can trick the brain to such an extent that it allowed them to reduce the sugar level in some recipes by 10-20 percent, although the results of these tests have not yet been published in any scientific journal.
It is important, however, to be careful when it comes to colors and food - there is some evidence that color can change our experience of food, but not affect our level of food intake in the long run.
Charles Spence, a psychologist at the University of Oxford who studies how the senses interact with each other and author of a book on the science of eating, says that most cross-influences between color, taste and mouthfeel come from the acquired social associations we build throughout our daily lives.
Most of them come from marketing and packaging, he says, but also from our experiences with the food we eat every day.
One thing is clear: we really do eat with our eyes first.
When we see an artificially colored product, we attach various assumptions and expectations to it before it even approaches our mouths.
We might expect a bright blue ice cream stick to taste like raspberry, for example, because we've been taught to expect that from ice cream sticks of that color that we've had before.
To make things more interesting, Taiwanese consumers might instead associate bright blue with a mint flavor, while British youth expect a raspberry flavor.
And when food company bosses play with that automatic association, it can affect our experience of food, says Spence.
If the bright blue ice cream tasted like orange, it would probably take you longer to recognize the taste.
Whether this can change the intensity of the taste we feel is still somewhat disputed in the scientific literature - some studies find this effect, some others do not.
Another study looked at how the color of a wine bottle label affected how volunteers perceived the taste of the red wine in it: red and black labels, for example, made them more likely to describe the wine as "strong."
- Why do we scream with pleasure
- Six indicators of how your memory can deceive you
- Why do we feel good when we swear?
To make things even weirder, color can also evoke other types of sensory information.
Imagine suddenly an ad for a towel pops up on your website - immediately the softness becomes palpable, almost as if you can feel it through the screen.
But the perceived plushness may not depend on the dense weave you see on the screen, but on its pastel color, at least according to the work of Atefeh Jazdanparasta Aredestani, an associate professor in the school of management at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.
"When I close my eyes and think of softness, certain colors come to mind - they're usually lighter, light pink, light blue," she says.
"That's the question I had in my head: what is the connection between our sense of sight and our sense of touch?".
Simply put, can colors convey softness or hardness without the experience of touch?
And so Ardestani ran some tests.
She asked volunteers to write down the colors they envisioned when they envisioned softness and, as expected, they mirrored her choice, leaning toward lighter tones.
She then asked the volunteers to look at different colors, three at a time: each was the same saturation, or intensity, but varied from lighter to darker.
When given adjectives to describe them, in 91,2 percent of cases the volunteers chose the lightest shade as the softest.
Although her findings have yet to be published and are undergoing peer review as part of a larger scientific study, she cites similar work with Turkish and Lebanese volunteers that produced similar findings.
Ardestani also studied American volunteers, so if her results are confirmed, it suggests that softness is a structural association with lighter colors rather than a semantic or linguistic one.
"The darker the color we see, the more intense the tactile sensation," she says.
In evolutionary terms, it could be that the darker tones served as a kind of warning to our ancestors, "priming them to be cautious," Ardestani speculates.
Ardestani's broader work deals with consumer decision-making, so she wanted to see how these findings could be applied outside the lab.
Again, she devised a test, this time asking volunteers to look at products on the screen in pairs - each the same color, but one a much lighter shade.
These were deliberately selected products where tactility can prove important in making a purchase decision - think towels, bedding, sofas.
"We found that lightness of color leads to higher expectations of softness, which is reflected in a higher likelihood of purchase."
Volunteers were also willing to pay more for items they perceived as soft.
Our brains seem to use color as a visual cue to compensate for touch.
And those who want to sell us things use it with great results - rolls of toilet paper, for example, are usually protected from our touch by plastic wrap in supermarkets, but are almost always bright pastel shades.
"90 percent of our initial product evaluation is based on color," says Ardestani.
But while pale hues can suggest softness, color intensity suggests quantity, according to Karen Schloss, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and one of the world's leading color scholars.
She helped give rise to the ecological valence theory of why we favor some colors over others.
It points to legends on data charts or maps.
The chosen colors - specifically, their intensity - may be intended to use that association to manipulate the way you interpret that information.
"People attribute maps with darker colors to greater quantity, which has been used very well in most pandemic maps I've seen — more cases or deaths are represented by darker colors," she says.
Similar associations can lead to problems, warns Šlos.
If data is presented in a way that uses brighter colors for larger quantities, it can lead to people misunderstanding what they see.
If the map appears on the screen for just a fraction of a second, "you're going to interpret it as dark more, not light more," even if that's not what the data says, she says.
But Schloss also showed that color can be used for good, too—such as encouraging more exemplary civic behavior.
Her most recent research dealt with the meaning we attribute to colors.
"We wanted to understand how color associations affect people's expectations - so we could anticipate them and make designs that match that, to make it easier for them to interpret," she says.
She and her colleagues used recycling bins as the basis for one particular experiment.
Imagine six such bins, identical in size and shape, but each designated for a different waste category with signs that read "glass," "metal," "mixture," and so on.
Schloss hypothesized that changing the color of the bin could subtly hint at its purpose, helping to facilitate citizen behavior and minimize sorting errors.
When she and her team showed volunteers pictures of six different colored bins and asked them to label them as they thought they should, a pattern surfaced.
Some colors were closely associated with a category: brown and yellow instantly suggested trash, for example.
Others, however, had weaker associations: red, for example, did not immediately evoke any category.
There was, however, a slight tendency to label the red bins with "plastic" when there were six to choose from.
The meaning of color is therefore contextual, adds Schlos.
A lone white bin obviously suggests paper, while a lone red bin means nothing.
When taken together, however, a series of six differently colored bins can influence each other and communicate much more and more subtly.
Other studies have shown that colors can directly affect performance, especially among children.
When eight- and nine-year-olds performed a series of tasks in the presence of different colors, the scientists found that their overall performance was significantly worse around red-gray, which were used as a baseline.
And forget blue sky thinking, try green space thinking - even if one creativity study is correct, which showed a correlation between creativity among children and the presence of that color or objects of that color such as plants.
And if you want the child to concentrate, maybe you should paint the classroom in colorful palettes and thus improve his learning results.
"All of this suggests that colors are much more powerful than we thought," says Schloss.
Follow us on Facebook, Twitter i Viber. If you have a topic proposal for us, contact us at bbcnasrpskom@bbc.co.uk
Bonus video:
