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Sporting contests

Seeing red? Putting sportswear in context (reply)

Nature volume 437, pages E10–E11 (2005)Cite this article

Rowe et al. corroborate our finding that the colour of clothing influences the outcome of sporting contests1, but they offer a different mechanism to explain the effect. We found that in four combat sports wearing red was consistently associated with improved performance relative to wearing blue2, and argued that wearing red enhances performance through psychological effects on the wearer and/or on the opponent. We suggested that these psychological effects reflect the evolutionary and cultural associations of red with dominance and aggression. Rowe et al. find that, in a fifth combat sport, wearers of blue outperformed wearers of white. They attribute their and our results to perceptual rather than to psychological effects, arguing that visibility of the opponent is the critical factor.

In our view, this visibility explanation is unlikely in a situation where contestants fight at close quarters in brightly lit arenas, as in these combat sports. Crucially, in the combat sports we analysed, the hypothesis of Rowe et al. requires that blue-wearing opponents be more visible than their red-wearing opponents, but, insofar as photographs provide an indication of this, the opposite seems to be true (see http://www.athens2004.com/en/BoxingImageGallery/imagegallery). Furthermore, the literature on visibility effects cited by Rowe et al. refers to sports where visuospatial judgements are made over distance. We also note that visibility has not been used to explain similar effects of artificially coloured leg bands on dominance interactions in birds3.

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References

  1. Rowe, C., Harris, J. M. & Roberts, S. C. Nature 437, 10.1038/nature04306doi:10.1038/nature04306 (2005).

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  1. Department of Anthropology, Evolutionary Anthropology Research Group, Durham University, Durham, DH1 3HN, UK

    Robert A. Barton & Russell A. Hill

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  1. Robert A. Barton
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  2. Russell A. Hill
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Correspondence to Russell A. Hill.

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Barton, R., Hill, R. Seeing red? Putting sportswear in context (reply). Nature 437, E10–E11 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature04307

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