Psych at Work

I'm always a big fan of psychology making its way into the "mainstream media" and I still get excited when I see some article in Cosmopolitan or The New York Times or some equally "popular" form of media that references a study in a psychological journal (and I'm even more excited when I can guess who one of the authors is - not as hard as you might think given that some people talk to the media a lot and their research is repeatedly featured... sort of like crosswords, after a while, you see that some answers appear over and over again). All that is just leading me to point out that Cosmopolitan magazine had a little article on how women are attracted to men wearing red... which cited a study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology!

So being the awesomely nerdy gal I am, I found the journal article. It was seven studies and they compared humans to nonhumans and vertebrates to invertebrates and it's a pretty long thing... but you can tell pretty quickly that - as usual - the Cosmo writers have taken some liberties... though they didn't completely overdo it like I think they are prone to do (which is not unique to them, of course - we all want better answers than just "it depends").

Nonetheless, you can see for yourself what Cosmo said compared to what the scholars had to say... here's what Cosmo had to say:

"Ladies found men in red clothing more attractive and sexually desirable. The not-so-shocking reason why? Women subconsciously viewed men wearing that color as being higher in status and more likely to earn a good salary."

The study's authors:

"Specifically, in a series of 7 experiments we demonstrate that women perceive men to be more attractive and sexually desirable when seen on a red background and in red clothing, and we additionally show that status perceptions are responsible for this red effect. The influence of red appears to be specific to women's romantic attraction to men: Red did not influence men's perceptions of other men, nor did it influence women's perceptions of men's overall likability, agreeableness, or extraversion."

(In case you want it, the full citation for the scholarly article is:

Elliot, A. J., Kayser, D. N., Greitemeyer, T., Lichtenfeld, S., Gramzow, R. H., Maier, M. A., & Liu, H. (2010). Red, rank, and romance in women viewing men. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 139(3), 399-417.)

All this is just to say that Cosmo did a better job with this one than they have with some other studies I've seen them report on in the past and that I'm excited that this study made it to Cosmo, even if I wish something a little less "evolutionary psychology-based" made it (because let's be fair, this basically says that women are gold diggers - a frequent bottom line in evolutionary psychology), but I'll settle for any psychology and some pretty good reporting...