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?

Snow – a few flakes and everything stops!

For anyone in the UK it will be no news that we’ve had the heaviest snow fall for 18 years. For anyone outside the UK – guess what…?

That’s not the interesting bit though. The interesting bit is the reaction which has been reported in the media to the snow and its consequent effects, particularly on the social infrastructure – transport, schools, hospitals etc. To be brief, for at least a day or two, everything stopped – no buses, few trains, schools closed, hospital clinics cancelled. In the red top (tabloid) newspapers, this was a scandal – Britain Grinds to a halt…what can’t we be like the Canadians or Russians who have weather much worse than this every year…etc?

This is not just about snow; it’s about how people and societies prepare for uncommon events. It’s just not practical or economic to have Moscow-style snow-clearing kit tucked away in warehouses all over the UK for use once every 20 years. Of course there will always be the ‘Something must be done’ brigade who argue that any inconvenience to their lives must be a sign of the downfall of British society, but more reasonable people will recognise that economy of preparation is a sensible course of action.

What does this have to do with exams? Well I think it illustrates the point about focussing your efforts on likelihoods. Yes, you can try to prepare for every possible, but unlikely, question. And if you are a highly able candidate (on the distinction/merit boundary) then it may well be worthwhile for you to have your mental snowploughs all oiled up and ready to roll. But if your abilities and goals are more modest (you’re on the pass/fail boundary), it makes more sense to prepare for the likely questions and if you’re unlucky enough to get a rare ‘snowstorm’ of a question, just accept that you’re going to have to rely on some hard shovelling to get you out!