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hockeygodRed sweaters not responsible for black and blue players
By Misty Harris, Postmedia News November 17, 2010
The theory that red or black uniforms give athletes an aggressive edge has long been claimed in sports research, with most of it citing the hues' evolutionary and cultural associations with such things as dominance and power.
But Team Canada might want to hold the high-fives, with a comprehensive new study putting that theory on thin ice — at least in the context of professional hockey.
Reporting in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, researchers say no matter how they measured — penalty minutes, number of severe penalties, team wins — there wasn't a shred of meaningful evidence that black or red jerseys lead to a spike in aggressive behaviour, or even perceived aggression, among National Hockey League players.
"For more than 20 years, people have been talking about this idea that wearing black causes athletes to act more aggressively. Then, more recently, there's been talk that red might have the same effect," says co-author Jerry Burger.
"But when we actually do a controlled study, we don't find any evidence for those claims at all — which is kind of too bad, since it's a really interesting suggestion."
Between 2008 and 2010, 326 NHL games were identified in which the home team played the same opponent within a single season: once wearing a black or red uniform, once wearing a uniform of another colour. This naturally occurring experiment was made possible by the NHL's decision to let teams wear a third jersey design for a limited number of home games.
For each pair of games, researchers compared total penalty minutes, number of severe penalties (a composite of such violent infractions as roughing, fighting and game misconduct), number of games that became atypically aggressive, and team success.
Across all categories, Burger says the differences between the two jersey conditions were "so small that we can't draw any conclusions."
The study is thought to be the first to eliminate or control for what researchers describe as the "severe limitations that plagued earlier investigations."
"It's not that previous findings about colour and aggression weren't real. Being able to say that one caused the other is the hang-up," says Burger, a psychology professor at Santa Clara University.
With black, the speculation has been that athletes pick up on cultural associations between the hue and badness, subconsciously altering their behaviour accordingly. With red, an evolutionary angle has been proposed, with scientists noting links in the animal kingdom between crimson and male dominance.
That one of the most high-profile of these earlier studies drew its data from the 1970s and early '80s may be a factor, suggests a Canadian hockey historian, noting that the game has since seen sharp declines in major brawling.
"Intimidation in the NHL used to be a much larger factor than it is today," says Earl Zukerman of McGill University in Montreal. "I think if you applied the (current) study to NHL fight data from the 1970s and earlier, you may come up with entirely different findings, as that was arguably an era where fighting and other roughhouse tactics were almost encouraged."
Nicholas Holt, a University of Alberta sports psychologist, suggests the study is a call to accountability. Although it's easy to pin aggression on uniform colour, he says it makes more sense to take a hard look at team leadership.
"If a coach encourages very physical and aggressive play, then athletes will likely follow his or her instructions," says Holt, associate professor in the faculty of physical education. "We really need to think about the messages conveyed by coaches, and in youth sport parents, in order to understand athletes' behaviours."
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