by Thalma Lobel
Researchers have adapted the idea of the Stroop effect to test metaphors. Instead of using incongruent color names and ink colors, they showed participants positive and negative words printed in bright or dark colors.1 Participants were presented with positive words such as generous, brave, faith, gentle, hero, kiss, love, devotion, mature, and loyal, and negative words such as cruel, crime, bitter, cancer, fraud, nasty, liar, poison, rude, and unfair, and they were asked to indicate whether each word was positive or negative. The researchers varied the brightness of the letters so that some of the words were bright and white, while others were dark and black. Then they measured how long it took participants to categorize the words as positive or negative. The faster the participants answered, the easier the task was assumed to have been. Researchers also measured how accurate the participants were, especially when they were told to answer as quickly as possible.
If metaphorical brightness is indeed related to positivity and darkness to negativity, then a dark positive word is metaphorically incongruent. The dark tint would interfere with the positive meaning of the word. A person who sees a positive word printed in dark ink receives two contradictory pieces of information. On the one hand, dark is negative, but, on the other hand, the word is positive. If positivity is automatically and instinctively associated with brightness and negativity with darkness, then the task should be more time-consuming when a positive word is dark and a negative word bright.
Indeed, it was much easier for participants to correctly categorize the words as positive when they were bright and as negative when they were dark. It took longer to categorize the words when they were bright but negative, or dark but positive. Participants were also less accurate when the positive words were dark and the negative words were bright, especially when they were pressed to answer quickly. These findings suggest that we instinctively associate brightness with positivity, white with good, dark with bad, and black with evil.
This effect is surprisingly strong. A group of Dutch researchers recently investigated these same associations, but in a different way from their American colleagues.2 Their experiment was ostensibly to see if the participants could translate certain Dutch words into Chinese (even though the participants did not speak Chinese). The researchers presented the participants with words in Dutch (their mother tongue), some of which were negative and some of which were positive. Under each word they presented two Chinese ideographs, one black and one white, and the participants had to choose which of the two ideographs was the correct translation of the Dutch word. The participants chose white ideographs more often when the word was positive and black ideographs when the word was negative. Remember, the participants had no knowledge of Chinese; they were just guessing.
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These experiments’ strong results suggest that we make judgments about the positivity or negativity of people and events based on seemingly irrelevant factors, such as the colors white and black. A person wearing white clothes is likely to be perceived more positively than a person wearing black clothes. Perhaps I was naturally inclined to enjoy the all-white Shavuot party, but on the flip side, I hate to think of how the other guests must have viewed me, a black swan in a sea of white.
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After completing my PhD at Tel Aviv University, I went with my husband and three-year-old daughter to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I did my postdoctorate studies at Harvard University while my husband did research at MIT. In Tel Aviv, our hometown, we had lived in a bright house with big windows and white walls. The first apartment we rented in Cambridge, however, had small windows, and walls painted a dark gray. I remember those first months in Cambridge as really difficult. Everything seemed negative to me, but I figured that this feeling was normal, attributing it to loneliness because I was in an unfamiliar place where I knew hardly anyone. A year later, we moved to another apartment, which was smaller but much brighter and with big windows. All of a sudden, I started thinking how great Cambridge was and how happy I was that we had moved there. I attributed this change in my feelings to the time that had passed, allowing me to get used to my new home, to make my way around, and to find friends. Looking back, however, I now believe my first months spent in a relatively dark apartment influenced my emotions and judgments. In fact, we ended up loving our time in Cambridge so much that seven years later, we returned for another year, when I taught in the Psychology Department at Harvard. That second time around we made sure to choose a bright apartment from the start. As a result, Cambridge looked beautiful and I was very happy there.
Black Eyes: Black and Destructive Behavior
More than twenty years ago, two researchers from Cornell University, Mark G. Frank and Thomas Gilovich, wanted to examine whether the black-evil and white-good associations influence not just our judgments but also our everyday actions.3 They showed participants black and white uniforms and found that people perceived the black uniforms as meaner and more aggressive than they perceived the white uniforms. They then examined fifteen years of penalty records of professional teams from the National Football League and the National Hockey League in the United States. They found that teams wearing black uniforms were penalized more often than teams wearing other colors.
It is interesting, but also troublesome, that these findings represent an unconscious bias. They offend our sense of fairness. The numbers might be explained in various ways, however. Perhaps those who wear black uniforms behave more aggressively and deserve to be penalized more often. Perhaps the coaches and general managers who chose black uniforms also selected more aggressive players to create a more aggressive team. To further investigate these potential causes, Frank and Gilovich conducted another experiment.
In this clever study, the researchers prepared two nearly identical videos of football plays with the only difference being that in one version the players wore white uniforms and in the other, black. The researchers showed the videos to two groups: students who were college football fans and professional football referees. Both groups were asked how likely they would be to penalize the team and how aggressively the team was playing. The results were astonishing. Both the college students and the professional referees said that they would penalize the team wearing black uniforms more often than the team wearing white. Remember, the game sequences were identical; the only thing that changed was the color of the uniforms. These results clearly demonstrate that the black uniform color influenced the referees, leading them to perceive those who wear black uniforms as more aggressive.
But are these results really so black and white? To examine whether wearing a black uniform influences not only the perceptions of the referees but also the actual behavior of those who wear that color, the researchers devised another experiment. Students from Cornell University were grouped in threes and told that another group was waiting in a separate room. Each “team” was given a list of twelve available games, and the participants were asked to choose five games in which to compete against the other group. The games varied in aggressiveness. Some were quite aggressive, such as human “cockfighting,” in which one person sits on the shoulders of another and tries to knock down the opposing team members. Some games were completely tame, such as stacking blocks. Participants were told that because each person had chosen a different game, they would now have to arrive at a consensus on which games they would play as a group. The experimenter asked them to wear uniforms so that they would really feel like a group while they made their decision and gave them either white or black uniforms. It turned out that those who were given black uniforms chose more aggressive games than those who wore white. Yet when participants did not wear uniforms, there was no difference between the two groups. It seems as though just the act of wearing the black uniform increased the group’s willingness to engage in aggressive games.
In 2012, a group of researchers wanted to expand on Frank and Gilovich’s first study on the effect of color on penalties in professional sports leagues, so they analyzed penalties in the Na
tional Hockey League with a considerably larger sample size: the last twenty-five seasons before 2010.4 Unlike Frank and Gilovich, who focused only on the difference between black and color jerseys, they also examined the difference between white and color jerseys. They found similar results regarding the black jerseys: more penalties were given when players were wearing black jerseys than when they were wearing other colors. It is interesting to note that this was true only for aggressive penalties, such as elbowing and boarding, and not for nonaggressive technical infractions, such as being offside or having too many men on the ice. The researchers also found that wearing white jerseys led to fewer penalties. In short, white was linked to less aggressive behavior and black to more aggressive behavior, at least as measured by the penalties.
These results suggest that the negative metaphors of black and the positive ones of white affect not only our judgments and evaluations but also our behavior. Wearing black might increase our aggressive behavior and also influence how we are judged by others. The fact that all the guests at the Shavuot party were wearing white might have affected their own behavior. They might really and truly have been behaving more nicely.
As Frank and Gilovich noted, context matters. In aggressive, competitive situations, black is associated with aggression and competitiveness. Uniforms are related to group identity and thus are not the same as regular clothes. But as soon as we suit up, we invite certain associations, whether in a sports uniform or in an official uniform, a police or military uniform, formal or black-tie attire.
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Why don’t we associate white with negatives and black with positives? How did we develop the universal associations of bright-positive and dark-negative? The answer, many scientists believe, is that we inherited these links over the course of our evolution as a species and they are reinforced by our individual experiences. The link between positivity and brightness, for example, may be embodied in our very biology. The fact is that we are diurnal, not nocturnal, creatures. We live by day, functioning better in the light, where we can see our surroundings. Life is less dangerous in the sunlight. We come into the world primed for light. Throughout our lives, we tend to experience things as better and more positive while in the light. Living by day conveys a survival advantage that we share with others.
Evolution established the link between darkness and danger, but our childhood experiences reinforce it. Even if children do not show any specific signs of fear of darkness, most children do not prefer the dark. My own children always wanted me to leave their bedroom doors open for a sliver of light. The associations between darkness and bad things begin at the sensory level, when children are lying in bed. In darkness, they feel alone and apart, scared and vulnerable. Upon closing his eyes, an infant sees darkness, but when he opens his eyes again he sees the light. Put yourself in the place of the baby and close your eyes for a full thirty seconds. How did it feel? How did your experience of your environment change? Did your posture or orientation shift? In the dark, we lose contact with our surroundings and are in a vulnerable position; someone could sneak up on us. In the light, on the other hand, we feel more in control; it is easier to adapt our behavior to fit in with others around us and to navigate our environment.
Darkness represents an undifferentiated chaos and disorder—even death. In the light, we are in touch with the world. This deep-seated emotional connection is poignantly illustrated in the last words of Goethe, the celebrated German poet and writer. “More light,” he said, asking his attendant to open the shutters covering the window.
Dim the Lights: Positivity, Negativity, and the Perception of Physical Brightness
Brightness is related to positive judgments, but is it possible that it can also work the other way around? Might our positive or negative judgments and emotions influence our perceptions of physical brightness? For example, will the same object or person look brighter when our own mood is bright and positive?
We perceive physical brightness from the amount of light that comes from a certain object. The more light that comes from an object, the brighter it appears. But our perception of brightness can be subjective and depend on context. For example, the brightness of the objects around us and the brightness of the background affect how we perceive the brightness or darkness of a particular object. Although in reality the same amount of light might come from two objects, our physical sensation of them can be affected by other factors. This is a well-known phenomenon that every photographer and event planner comes to understand.
Checker-shadow illusion: the squares marked A and B are the same shade of gray.
It is hard to believe, but squares A and B are the same shade of gray.I Square A is on a light background, and square B is on a dark background. If you are skeptical, cover the squares that surround squares A and B and examine them again.
Several researchers have examined the possibility that the brightness of an object is influenced by psychological factors such as judgments, emotions, and positive and negative associations. The same object may look brighter after we have been exposed to positive words and darker after we have been exposed to negative words.
In one experiment, participants wore headphones while one hundred words, fifty positive and fifty negative, appeared on the screen, one at a time.5 Participants had to declare whether the word they were seeing was positive or negative. They were told that after each word they would also see on the screen either a bright square or a dark square. Participants had to indicate whether that square was the darker or the brighter one. In fact, there was only one square. After evaluating negative words, participants more often believed that they saw the “darker square,” while after evaluating the positive words, participants believed more often that they saw the “brighter square.” Yet remember, they always saw exactly the same square.
In another experiment, the same researchers presented participants with positive and negative words that appeared on the screen in differing degrees of brightness. Participants evaluated each word as positive or negative and then were shown five squares that differed in gradations of darkness (on a spectrum from white to black). They had to choose the square that matched the color of the word. For instance, participants were presented with positive words such as clean, champion, hero, polite, and nurse, and negative words such as vulgar, bitter, crooked, diseased, and enemy. As in the previous study, the perception of physical brightness depended on the positivity or negativity of the meaning of the word. Participants more frequently chose a lighter shade for positive words than for negative words, even though there were bright and dark words in both positive and negative categories.
Researchers examined metaphors such as bright smile by studying whether smiling faces are indeed perceived as physically brighter, in terms of light strength, compared with frowning faces.6 In several experiments, the researchers found that the metaphor bright smile is not just a figure of speech; smiling faces presented in different colors and in different formats were perceived as physically brighter than frowning faces.
In a recent study participants were asked to recall and describe an unethical or ethical behavior from their past, then asked to judge the brightness of the room on a seven-point scale.7 Those who recalled an unethical deed rated the room as darker than those who recalled an ethical deed. In a second study participants were similarly asked to recall and describe an ethical or unethical deed but then asked to state their preferences for light-related products—a flashlight, a candle, and a lamp—and neutral products: crackers, an apple, and a jug. Those who recalled an unethical deed showed greater preference for the light-related products than those who recalled an ethical behavior.
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Amazingly, all these findings demonstrate that the perception of brightness or darkness depends not only on the objective brightness of that stimulus, which is the amount of light coming from it, but also on our psychological and moral evaluations. Our eyes see something, but our minds change it according to our bias, which is evident
in our metaphors. The amount of light coming from two different objects may be exactly the same, but if one is negative (e.g., a gun) and the other one is neutral or positive (e.g., a dark-colored flower, such as a pansy), the negative object will look darker than the positive one. Making this distinction is automatic and instinctive. When we judge a person as bad, we probably perceive his surroundings as being darker too. When we have a good, positive experience, we perceive that day as brighter. These relationships between brightness and positivity and darkness and negativity go both ways: bright things are perceived as more positive, and positive things are perceived as brighter. Similarly, darker things are perceived as negative, and negative things are perceived as darker.
Like a Thief in the Night
In a study provocatively titled “The Color of Sin,” two researchers focused on a specific aspect of negativity: immorality.8 They also used the Stroop effect, but in a different way. Participants were asked to read immoral and moral words, such as abusive, cheat, sin, evil, honesty, freedom, helping, and justice, printed in black or white. However, unlike participants in previous studies, who were asked to indicate whether words were positive or negative, the participants here were asked to name the color that the words were printed in—black or white. Participants identified the colors of moral words, such as honesty and kind, faster when they were printed in white, and the colors of immoral words, such as cruel and cheat, faster when they were printed in black. We automatically and instinctively associate immorality with black and morality with white. This association may also influence our moral or immoral behavior in the real world.
