The dark side of self- and social perception: Black uniforms and aggression in professional sports.

Black is viewed as the color of evil and death in virtually all cultures.With this association in mind, we were interested in whether a cue as subtle as the color of a person's clothing might have a significant impact on his or her behavior.To test this possibility, we examined whether professional football and ice hockey teams that wear black uniforms are more aggressive than those that wear nonblack uniforms.An analysis of the penalty records of the National Football League and the National Hockey League indicate that teams with black uniforms in both sports ranked near the top of their leagues in penalties throughout the period of study.On those occasions when a team switched from nonblack to black uniforms, the switch was accompanied by an immediate increase in penalties.The results of two laboratory experiments indicate that this finding can be attributed to both social perception and self-perception processes-that is, to the biased judgments of referees and to the increased aggressiveness of the players themselves.Our discussion focuses on the theoretical implications of these data for an understanding of the variable, or "situated," nature of the self.A convenient feature of the traditional American Western film was the ease with which the viewer could distinguish the good guys from the bad guys: The bad guys wore the black hats.Of course, film directors did not invent this connection between black and evil, but built upon an existing association that extends deep into our culture and language.When a terrible thing happens on a given day, we refer to it as a "black day," as when the Depression was ushered in by the infamous "Black Thursday."We can hurt ourselves by "blackening" our reputation or be hurt by others by being "blacklisted," "blackballed," or "blackmailed" (Williams, 1964).When the Chicago White Sox deliberately lost the 1919 World Series as part of a betting scheme, they became known as the Chicago Black Sox, and to this day this "dark" chapter in American sports history is known as the Black Sox Scandal.In a similar vein, Muhammed Ali has observed that we refer to white cake as "angel food cake" and dark cake as "devil's food cake."These anecdotes concerning people's negative associations to the color black are reinforced by the research literature on color meanings.In one representative experiment, groups of college students and seventh graders who were asked to make semantic differential ratings of colors were found to associate black with evil, death, and badness (Williams & McMurty, 1970).More-