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, & Clark, 1997; Milinski & Bakker, 1990; Setchell & Wickings, 2005). Rowe, Harris, and Roberts (2005) criticized this argument and instead attributed the bias evident in these and other data (judo) to differences in opponents' visibility. We disagree with both interpretations (see also Barton & Hill, 2005), arguing that this phenomenon is actually due to a perceptual bias in the referee. That is, we propose that the perception of colors triggers a psychological effect in referees that can lead to bias in evaluating identical performances. Referees and umpires exert a major influence on the outcome of sports competitions (Plessner & Haar, 2006). Athletes frequently make very rapid movements, and referees have to view sports competitions from a very disadvantageous perspective, so it is extremely difficult for them to make objective judgments (Oudejans et al., 2000). As a result, their judgments may show biases like those found in other social judgments (Frank & Gilovich, 1988; Plessner & Haar, 2006; 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.