Today I've been contemplating going back to the office on Monday after a nice, productive holiday break. One thing I'm not looking forward to is the inevitable interrupting visit to my office of somebody with some bad news or information that I just don't want to be bothered with! We all suffer from these "Debbie Downers" at the office...they can upset, disturb, distract, and ruin a perfectly good day! But I was thinking back over the last few months since I moved into my new office and noticed that I've had significantly fewer annoying interruptions from bad personalities (the visits from people with great news and wonderful ideas has actually continued uninterrupted!) ever since I did one thing about a month after moving in...
I hung 4 two by three foot color images of flowers I photographed several years ago. They are posted throughout this blogpost!
Before I hung them, almost everyday I had some unusually sour tempered person come into my office and unload...either my research idea wasn't that great, or teaching this year will be impossibly hard, or my approval wasn't going to be granted on something. Oh, it was tough to keep going after getting sideswiped midday like that. But since those 4 images have gone up, all that has stopped...nothing but good news. People even come by just to talk about photography and almost everyone comments on the images when they walk in. Could these images and their hues of yellow, green and blue, prime people to behave differently?
While imagery in advertsing has been looked at quite extensively in the consumer behavior literature, there is a relatively new body of literature that is beginning to look at the effect of color. Mehta and Zhu from U. of British Columbia did a great paper in Science on the effect of red and blue on approach and avoidance behavior. I am collecting data next week that will hopefully build on these results trying to understand the effect of color on risk behavior.
So I have a challenge to you! Try this experiment in your office or home to see if it changes how people act when they come in. Download these images, print them out (in color of course) and place them in prominent view wherever you need a little protection from people with bad vibes. Observe whether there's any change! Let me know if you see a difference or not...I'd love to know whether this is really an effect I'm noticing or just random chance!!
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