Can a uniform’s colour give a team the scare factor? 
With Halloween bringing colour into focus, research shows how colours of sports uniforms might affect perception

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Before a point is scored or shot is taken, a team’s uniform might be the first thing one notices when spectating a sport or playing against an opponent. It can affect your first impressions of a team and, beneath the surface, lead you to associate certain skills and strengths with its players before ever watching them play.

A research paper about colour psychology emphasises that colour can influence how people interpret what they see and feel about something. In sports, these interpretations might involve traits like aggression and even your first impression of who is most likely to win, especially if you’re not as familiar with a team. For spectators watching from the sidelines, it can be difficult to tell how much of their  first impressions come from an athlete’s ability, and how much comes from the colour of their uniform. 

With Halloween bringing orange, black, and red into the spotlight, it makes us wonder whether dressing to color can also extend to the playing field. Can a uniform really make an opponent seem more intimidating? 

The colour black provides one of the most interesting case studies for this. According to psychologists Mark Fran and Thomas Gilovich from the 1980s, professional football and hockey teams wearing black ranked near the top in penalties during the period studied and those who switched from other colors to black noticed an increase in penalties as well. The research also highlights that both player and spectators behavior could contribute to this pattern. It also points towards the possibility that uniform color can influence someone’s behaviour as well as how actions might also be perceived. 

For spectators, the uniform might therefore become part of the context through which an athlete’s actions are interpreted. This can influence the story viewers are telling themselves about a team even before they have watched enough of the game to assess its performance.

According to a paper published in the Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, spectators viewing photographs of boxing and wrestling competitors’ perceived athletes wearing red as more likely to win than those wearing other colors. However, the same research looked into taekwondo and found no correlation. 

The use of photographs makes these findings more interesting. Uniform and colours become some of the first cues available as someone internally decides which team is most likely to win. 

Furthermore, a meta analysis conducted on the color red in combat sports, found that there was statistical indistinguishable from an even split and the findings challenge the idea that wearing red relatively improves competitive success even though perception might say otherwise. 

When looking at the University of Toronto’s sports teams, the St. George (UTSG) Red team has experienced both wins and losses against the UTM Eagles. On February 22, UTM’s men’s basketball team defeated UTSG Red 64-56, but have also lost on other days. The same goes for the women’s basketball team where there are differences in performances after every season. This however does not establish a direct correlation to color. 

It is important to note that each sport is different and that different colors might be associated with different traits depending on the context. In addition, uniforms that have a mix of colors are not considered in the studies and colour perception becomes more challenging to assess. For example, Argentina wears blue and white stripes, like our UTM Eagles, while Minnesota Wild wear red and green, and FC Barcelona famously wear red and blue. Studies examining various colour combinations could be interesting especially when considering someone’s familiarity with the team and its colours. 

As spectators or avid sports watchers, this gives us a reason to reconsider our first impressions and how much we might assume about a team before watching them play. So this Halloween season, let’s consider how much of that scare factor comes from the opponent and how much we bring to it through our own perception of external factors. 

Interested in seeing how you perceive colour in sports? Come and support your UTM Eagles home and away this fall season, and see whether the uniform really affects your personal perception of a team and whether those impressions change as the game progresses. Check out the schedules for your favourite sports on UTM’s Recreation, Athletics and Wellness website to find upcoming times, games and locations!

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