When the Referee Sees Red …

Hill and Barton (2005) showed that wearing red sports attire has a positive impact on one's outcome in a combat sport (e.g., tae kwon do or wrestling). They suggested that this effect is due to an evolutionary or cultural association of the color red with dominance and aggression, proposing that this association triggers a psychological effect in an athlete who wears red (or in his or her opponent; e.g., Cuthill, Hunt, Cleary, Milinski Setchell Plessner Ste-Marie & Valiquette, 1996). Therefore, we believe that it is the referees who are the actual cause of the advantage competitors have when they wear red. Because the effect of red clothing on performance and on the decisions of referees may well have been confounded in the original data, we conducted a new experiment and found that referees assign more points to tae kwon do competitors dressed in red than to those dressed in blue, even when the performance of the competitors is identical.