Romantic Red Effect Essay

Presented in their article Romantic Red: Red Enhances Men’s Attraction to Women, Andrew J. Elliot and Daniela Niesta explain the romantic red effect, which is how the color red leads men to view women as more attractive and more sexually desirable. In recent work, Elliot et al. proposed that colors are able to carry specific meaning and play an important role in psychological functioning through the color in context theory. By showing that red can have averse implications in situations involving achievement context as well as positive implications in relational context, the context specificity of red is directly correlated to the color in context theory. The psychological effect of red could vary in different situations because such signal …show more content…
The independent variable in this experiment was whether participants were assigned to a red condition or green condition. After that, the dependent variable was operationalized by having participants rate a young woman on various aspects of her attractiveness. It was found that participants under the red condition rated the target woman higher in all categories of attractiveness. In addition, the effect of color on perceived kindness and intelligence was also assessed, but it was found that color had no effect on the perception of either attribute.
Sociocultural theorists would likely explain this phenomena because of the historical pairing of red and sex within our society whereas behaviorists would believe this correlation to be from experiences where females wearing red have been rewarded by attracting males in the past and thus continue to perform such behavior. Bio-social theorists would likely attribute these perceptions to the red flush of the skin of women nearing ovulation, thus attracting mates who peirceive this color as a sexual