Do Colors Really Warp1 Our Behavior?

Claudia Hammond

我们所生活的世界是五光十色的，色彩可以说无处不在。一直以来，我们似乎都非常相信颜色会影响到我们的心情：湖蓝色衣服会让人觉得清凉；肉类调制成酱红色会使人更有食欲；绿色则给人以生命、健康之感。而且现在的生活中，人们越来越多地讲究色彩与色调的搭配，比如家居设计、服装搭配等。但是，颜色对人类行为的影响真的是我们所认为的那样吗？或许这个观念要被颠覆了。

We can spend hours choosing the right paint color for a room to create just the mood we want. We pore over paint charts and bring home tester pots.2. pore over: 注视；paint chart:油漆颜色表；tester: 试用品。Doctors’ surgeries are painted white to give us that sense of clinical cleanliness, fast food shops are red or yellow and some prison cells are painted pink in the hope of reducing aggression.3. 医生的手术室刷的是白色油漆，给人以病房的洁净感；快餐店刷的是红色或者黄色；有些监狱则刷成粉色，希望能降低犯人的攻击性。clinical: 医院的，诊所的。

We might think we know which colors do what. The idea that red wakes us up or blue calms us down is deeply engrained4. engra in: 使……根深蒂固。in Western culture—to the point that many consider it a fact. But do they really change our behavior in the ways that we assume?

When it comes to scientific research, the results are mixed and at times contested5. contest: 争辩，对……提出质疑。. Red is the color that gets studied most often and tends to be compared with either blue or green. Some studies have found that people do better on cognitive6. cognitive: 认知的。tasks when faced with red rather than blue or green; others show the opposite. The mechanism most often cited is conditioning.7. mechanism: 原理；cite: 引用；conditioning: 条件反射。The idea is that if you repeatedly have a particular experience surrounded by a certain color, then you eventually begin to associate that color with the way you were feeling or behaving. It’s been suggested that a school career spent reading your teacher’s red writing circling your mistakes forever makes you link red with danger and this is underlined by the fact that poisonous fruits are often red.8. 有人提出，上学期间你会一直看到老师用红色笔圈出你的错误，这段经历会让你永远把红色跟危险联系在一起；而且，很多有毒的水果也是红色的，这是又一力证。underline: 强调。Blue meanwhile is more likely to be associated with calmer situations like staring at the sea or marveling at9. marvel at: 对……感到惊奇。a big blue expanse of sky.

Of course there will always be exceptions—the comment from the teacher saying “well done” is also written in red and raspberries are red, but perfectly edible.10. raspberry: 树莓；edible: 可食用的。It is true that people do make different associations with different colors, but whether this translates into behaving in a certain way or succeeding at a particular task is a different question.

After so many mixed results in the past, in 2009 researchers at the University of British Columbia tried to clarify the situation once and for all.11. clarify: 阐明；once for all: 一劳永逸地。They sat their participants at computer screens colored blue, red or “neutral” and tested them on various tasks.12. 他们让实验参与者们分别对着蓝色、红色或者暗色的电脑屏幕，然后给他们不同的任务进行测试。sit: v. 使……坐下；neutral: （颜色）不鲜艳的。With a red screen people did better on tests of memory and proof-reading13. proof-reading: 校对。,tasks requiring attention to detail, but when the screen was blue they did better on creative tasks, such as thinking of as many uses as possible for a single brick. The authors speculated that red signaled“avoidance” and so they were more careful, while blue motivated the opposite: an “approach” behavior that encouraged them to be freer with their thinking, resulting in more creativity.14. 该文作者们推测：红色标志着“避免”，所以参与者们更细心；而蓝色则相反，它能刺激人们找“路子”的行为，因此参与者们在思考时更自由，创造力更强。speculate: 推测；signal: 标志。

However, when another team tried to replicate the anagram part of the study with a larger group of people in 2014,15. replicate: 复制；anagram: 变位词（组），指变换或颠倒字母顺序而构成新词。the effect of color disappeared. The initial study comprised just 69 people.16. initial: 最初的；comprise: 包含。In this new, bigger study, of 263 volunteers, background color made no difference17. make no difference: 不起作用。.

Clearly, studying the effect of color is much harder than it looks—or maybe colors just don’t have the effect that we expect. Yet we are convinced enough that they do for some prisons in the USA,Switzerland, Germany, Poland, Austria and the UK to paint their cells in a particular shade of pink.18. Switzerland: 瑞士；shade: 色调。In Switzerland 20% of prisons and police stations have at least one pink cell. It’s a shade I’d call blancmange pink, but its proper name is Baker-Miller pink,19. blancmange: 牛奶冻；Baker-Miller pink: 一种粉色调，是由白色乳胶漆与红色半光亮漆混合而成的油漆颜色。after two US Naval officers who first studied the effects of pink walls on prisoners.

Back in 1979 prisoners were shown a blue card or a pink card and then had to try to resist the pressure of the experimenter pushing down on their arms. With the blue card they pushed harder, so was the pink card somehow reducing their aggression? Possibly not. The experimenter knew which card had been shown, so without even realizing it they might have eased up a bit on the pink card. What’s more they had a trial run20. trial run: 试验。,followed by the pink card and finally the blue, so perhaps they were just more practiced when it came to the blue card. Several attempts to replicate these results in better-designed studies have failed. But they did follow up with an experiment conducted in real prison cells which were either white or pink, mixing a pint of red paint with a gallon of white to obtain this lovely shade.21. pint: 品脱（液量或干量单位）；gallon: 加仑（液量单位，英制为4.546升，美制为3.785升）。Once again the order of the colors was the same for everyone, so maybe it was the repainting of the cell that made a difference, rather than its pinkness.

In 2014, Genschow’s team entered a maximum security jail in Switzerland to re-examine the hypothesis.22. maximum security: 最高戒备；hypothesis: 假设。Their study was far better designed than the research from 30 years ago. Inmates held in detention after breaking prison regulations were randomised to cells either painted pink all over or with grey on the walls and white on the ceiling.23. inmate: 同狱犯人；detention: 拘留；randomise: 使随机化。Prison officers were trained to use an aggression scale to assess the prisoners’behavior.24. aggression scale: 攻击量表；assess:评估。The results were disappointing for those who have gone to the trouble to paint cells pink. After three days in the either cell prisoner were less aggressive than when they were first brought to cell. The color of the walls made no difference at all.

The authors concede25. concede: 承认。that a larger study might have found differences, but if the color only makes a difference for a few people, then authorities need to make a judgement about whether it’s worthwhile. The researchers even suggest that blancmange pink walls might have negative effects if prisoners feel emasculated by having a traditionally feminine color on the walls.26. negative: 消极的；emasculated: 柔弱的，无力的； feminine: 女性的，柔弱的。

So colors might well have an effect, but so far those effects have been difficult to demonstrate consistently and sometimes don’t seem to exist at all. Better-controlled studies are slowly emerging, but it may be some time before we get a full picture of how color affects us, let alone understand the exact mechanisms through which it happens. For the time being, interior decoration should be, as ever, a mix of personal taste and artistic flair.27. interior decoration: 室内装修；flair:资质，鉴别力。