Red for detail & blue for creativity – do colours matter?

Many people like to mark up their study notes with different colours and in some cases use a consistent ‘system’ – one colour for names, one for concepts etc. That’s just a personal choice, like choosing which colour clothes to wear.

However, it has been suggested that particular colours can consistently affect academic performance, and I saw this paper recently reported in Scientific American “Color (sic!) scheme: Red focuses attention, blue sets your mind free.” Which suggested that students should use different coloured pens for different types of study. I was intrigued, so I dug out the original paper which is freely available online.

In this study, psychologists in a Canadian business school were interested in the responses of people to red and blue computer screen backgrounds whilst people performed a series of tasks. The researchers mentioned that there are consistent associations with colours (within our society at least), but proposed that the conscious effects of red and blue in particular were contrary to expectations. Bottom line was that they found results consistent with the hypothesis that red encouraged an avoidance response and blue an approach response, so red should encourage detailed work where avoidance of error is important and blue should encourage creative work by imbuing an approach response.

Now I’m not going to go into a critique of the methodological or statistical holes in this paper (I’ll just say “Overlapping confidence intervals” and leave it at that!), but lets get down to brass tacks. Should you take studies like this seriously, along with ones that tell you to play baroque music, or have vanilla in the air while you study?

At the moment, the honest answer is that no one probably knows, but if there is an effect it’s probably small, and overwhelmed by other more mainstream factors like motivation, organisation and hard work. So if you want to use red and blue pens or change your computer screen colour, go ahead. And if you believe it will work, then as a trained hypnotist I can tell you that suggestion is a powerful tool. Just don’t expect miracles, eh?