In this paper, we ask: Might these phenomena documented in lab experiments also affect online behavior? Could color drive how we act on social media? For example, prior work has shown that Red is associated with excitement, Yellow with cheerfulness and Blue with comfort. In short, they have remarkable power to move us emotionally. In addition to inducing calm, colors can evoke powerful reactions like warmth, relaxation, danger and energy.

According to the Navy’s follow-up report, 'Since the initiation of this procedure … there have been no incidents of erratic or hostile behavior'. Rates of violent behavior fell dramatically after exposure to the plain pink walls. To test his theory, he convinced the directors of a naval prison to paint their cells pink, believing pink would calm the inmates. For example, in 1979, a director at the American Institute for Biosocial Research began observing curious psychological variation in his patients-variation seemingly rooted in what colors he showed them. design of engaging image filters.Ĭolor is a ubiquitous perceptual stimulus that is often linked with psychological functioning in humans. We conclude with a discussion on the theoretical, practical and design implications suggested by this work-e.g. In addition to contributing to the research conversation surrounding diffusion, these findings suggest future work using sophisticated computer vision techniques. To our knowledge, our study is the first to investigate how colors relate to online user behavior. Specifically, Red, Purple and pink seem to promote diffusion, while Green, Blue, Black and Yellow suppress it. Drawing on a corpus of one million images crawled from Pinterest, we find that color significantly impacts the diffusion of images and adoption of content on image sharing communities such as Pinterest, even after partially controlling for network structure and activity.

In this paper, we investigate whether there is link between color and diffusion.

Might these phenomena drive how we act online? A key research challenge for image-sharing communities is uncovering the mechanisms by which content spreads through the community. Many lab studies have shown that colors can evoke powerful emotions and impact human behavior.

Pinterest logo pink