The color red not only makes women more alluring to men, but influences men’s actual romantic behavior as well, a published study found.
Daniela Niesta Kayser, Andrew J. Elliot and Roger Feltman of the University of Rochester conducted the study to see if the color red influenced men’s behavior towards women.
“It appears that women would do well to wear a red shirt or dress when preparing for a date with a desirable man, and women may be particularly successful in online dating when they post a picture of themselves in red apparel,” Kayser and her colleagues wrote in their study.
Previous research has found that men find women wearing red more attractive than women wearing other colors, but whether the influence of red on men’s perception of attractiveness would affect their actual behavior remained uncertain.
The study found that male undergraduate students who viewed a picture of a women in a red shirt were more likely to ask her intimate questions than the same women wearing a green shirt. A subsequent experiment found that those who viewed a women in a red shirt chose to sit closer to her compared to those who viewed the same woman in a blue shirt.
“Men showed, in their actions, that they were particularly attracted to the ‘lady in red,'” Kayser and her colleagues said. “Our findings were obtained across participants’ perception of their own attractiveness, and were independent of mood.”
In many primate species, females display red on their body when nearing ovulation and humans may be biologically predisposed to viewing red as a sexual signal.
“Our findings are in line with an evolutionary perspective on human attraction, and the paralells between men and their more primitive male counterparts in their behavioral response to female red are undeniably striking,” the study notes.
Kayser and her colleagues believe the effect of red “is due to a biologically based predisposition that is both reinforced and extended by social learning,” such as the association of red with lust, passion, and sexuality in mythology and cosmetics.
The study was published in volume 40 of the European Journal of Social Psychology in 2010.
