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We've done a bunch of research here at the University of Rochester in the past looking
at how men perceive women in red. And we found that men perceive women in red as particularly
attractive and the reason why they find them attractive is because they perceive them as
sexually available or sexually interested. So we wanted to take this line of research
a step further and see how women perceive other women in red. So in our experiments
we showed women photographs of other women and we had manipulated the clothing color
of the women in those photographs to where the pictures were identical. The only thing
that was different was the color and we asked women various questions about them. So, how
interested in sex does this person seem? How flirtatious is she? How seductive is she?
And we find that the exact same person, when wearing red, relative to white or green, is
perceived as much more sexually interested and available. We also found that women were
likely to insult these other women when wearing red, specifically on topics regarding their
sexual fidelities. There likely to say, for example, this woman probably can't stay loyal
to just one man at a time. She probably cheats on men and then very interestingly we recruited
women who were in committed romantic relationships and we asked them how likely they'd be to
introduce their partner to a women in red versus green. How likely to let their partner
spend time alone with her and we find that women are much less likely to have their man
anywhere near a women in red, essentially. The big picture take away is that color is
much more than meets the eye and this is something that we take for granted all the time so we
go through life thinking that color is just here for our visual pleasure but really color
can convey information to people that regardless of our intentions, whether or not we want
it to, people can pick up on color as a cue to certain things and that may effect on how
people view us. It may affect how people treat us and this kind of information is really
handy to have when navigating the social world.