Dating Wear Red

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In the popular press article titled “The Science of Dating: Wear Red” Professor Andrew Elliot makes the claim that the reason the color red increases attraction in human males towards females is due to biological impulses and cultural influences (Luscombe, 2010). The professor makes the claim that societal use of red to symbolize sexuality, lust and passion influences how we perceive the color. Additionally, Professor Andrew claims that primal biological impulses influence how we perceive the color due to the fact that from an evolutionary perspective, a red rear end symbolizes that the female is in heat (Luscombe, 2010. After reading the original scientific article, which the popular press article was based on, I choose to reject the claim that the …show more content…

This decision is based on the fact that the popular press article recreated the experiments without a control group, the experiment lacked standardized phrases and the claim made in the article was not supported by the experiments conducted.
The lack of a control group in the popular press article made the results unreliable. Without a control group, how did the researchers know when a group exhibited more or less of a certain behavior? Contrast this with the original experiment where the researchers included a control group by making sure that the colors used matched in lightness and chroma (Kayser, Elliot, & Feltman, 2010). By making sure that the colors matched in lightness and chroma, the researchers were able to rule out confounding variables that might’ve affect the results. Controlling for the aforementioned confounding variables allowed the researchers to come to the conclusion that the effect observed was due to the color and not due to lightness or chroma (Kayser et al., 2010). However, in the popular press experiment, the researchers conducted the experiments with a woman wearing red or

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