DRUNK TANK PINK

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Drunk Tank Pink is both the name of the book I’ll be featuring this week as well as a color that apparently has a calming influence on male aggressiveness.  Regarding the latter, its name is derived from a phenomenon in the 1980’s when many county jails began tossing violent drunks into pink holding cells.  These Sheriffs did so because an earlier scientific paper concluded that this color had the amazing power of making men actually weaker (as measured by their squeezing a measurement device called a dynamometer after staring at pink cardboard).  Maybe it would also make the otherwise violent drunks less aggressive, less problematic.

Jails were not the only ones who jumped on the bandwagon.  Psychiatrists, dentists, teachers and parents all began painting their walls bright pink.  Public housing painted their interiors pink and saw declines in violent behavior, while some busses introduced pink seats to minimize vandalism.  Two of my favorite examples: 1) Underdogs in boxing matches wore pink trunks hoping the color might weaken their opponent; and 2) the football coaches at a few universities painted the locker room of the visiting team pink, assuming it might give the home team an advantage in a sport that demanded aggression and strength (whether it did or not, athletic conferences demanded the rooms be repainted in a different color).

Now to the book by the same name.  The Author, an NYU Business and Psychology Professor, argues that color is but one of many ‘cues’ that subliminally impact our behavior. 

Re: names, for example, the psychiatrist Carl Jung famously suggested he was perhaps fixated on the concept of rebirth in his work because his name Jung (which means ‘young’) subconsciously pushed him in that direction, just as Freud (which means Joy in German) might have been led to champion the pleasure principle and Adler (which means Eagle) might have focused on power.  Or consider: the former Chief Justice of England was named Igor Judge, while his colleague was Justice Laws; or Israeli tennis player Anna Smashnova, Layne Beachley the seven-time world champion surfer, Christopher Coke the notorious Jamaican drug dealer.  In an anti-example, one Russian man was so traumatized by taunts connected to his name (which meant slave) he chose to give his son the name BOHdVF260602, which stood for Biological Object Human descendant along with his date of birth, a so-totally generic description he couldn’t possibly be influenced by his name.  Which I’m sure is the exact opposite of what happened.

Symbols also influence us.  In one study, participants were challenged with creative thinking task.  Those primed by first being exposed to the Apple logo (a company renown for innovation) scored much higher than similar students who were exposed to the IBM symbol (reflective of a more conservative business model).

Alter goes on to explore many more quiet influences – such as the labels we give people, the climate we grow up in, the colors (like blue police uniforms) we wear, the people we surround ourselves with – to further demonstrate how unexpected forces shape how we think, feel and behave.

What hidden forces are influencing your life? Does recognizing them make you want to act any differently?