The Red Team Wins

Voltageaav writes "Recent studies indicate that in both First Person Shooters and even athletic competitions, wearing red gives you an advantage. It's speculated that this distracts the other team slightly due to the psychological aspect of people turning red when angry." Of course the Blue Team loses — as evidence I submit the history of the Detroit Lions.

WAAGH!

[vertinox]

"Da red wunz go fasta!"

Re:TF2 Stats say...

[Das Modell]

Goldrush is an asymmetric map where the blue team attacks and the red team defends.

The results don't mean anything!

[CunningPike]

For a fixed number of games, there's always a bit of uncertainty about what the true probability of red winning is. The more games analysed the less this uncertainty will be.

So, to look at what this study actually tells us, we can use some simple statistics [wikipedia.org] to determine what range of probabilities we're 99.999% sure the true probability of red winning lies within. (This is example #3: "The coin is tossed...").

And the answer is, given 1,347 trials (games) with a 55% red-wins outcome, the true value lies somewhere between 49% and 61% (inclusive).
So we're 99.999% sure that the results have not ruled out the null hypothesis: that wearing red has no effect at all.

There may be a real effect here, but more work is needed! Until then, Occam's razor selects the simpler explanation: there's no effect.

Does Red Cost You More?

[cayenne8]

"Yeah, the only case I can think of where the guy wearing red always wins in bullfighting, and that's kind of rigged.

As an aside, people also turn red when they are embarrassed or drunk, so wouldn't the psychological effect cancel itself out?"

Funny...I remember when I bought a red Corvette...that everyone told me not to get red, because it would make your insurance higher. I'd heard that all my life.

I called State Farm and asked them if color mattered as to my insurance rate. Nope.

What matters is your driving record, your sex, the price of the car (repairs), and it seems these days strangely enough...your credit rating?!?!

Re:That explains a lot in Detroit anyway.

[silver6]

Also the Montreal Canadians who have the biggest Stanley Cup dynasty of all time wear red too, although they haven't done so good lately.

Re:Reminds me...

[Anonymous Coward]

In Sweden all exit and emergency signs have a green background with white text.

Re:TF2 Stats say...

[LastToKnow]

This is true, and of course the asmmetric maps are a bad place to look for color disparity, I just meant to be funny. However Well, Granary, and Badlands are symmetric maps, and all three of those have red winning slightly more often than blue.

Re:Does Red Cost You More?

[Tawnos]

Grey is actually the car to get the most speeding tickets. Red isn't anything special. White gets fewer.

Source: http://www.snopes.com/autos/law/redcars.asp [snopes.com]

Camouflage

[Hadlock]

I think it has more to do with the fact that the general color palette is reddish orange, and one team wears reddish orange, while the other wears blueish black. This is a pretty good study on how well camouflage actually works. They do make it a little easier to see the snipahs than in real life (TF2 snipahs wear a black vest and black pants) vs. real life snipers who are usually wearing a blanket covered in shrubbery. But overall it looks like camouflage grants you a 5% increase in Win.

Re:I disagree.

[jonaskoelker]

I think "D" isn't quite "Q.E." yet.

Demonstrated isn't quite that which was to have been? ;)

Q.E.D. is an abbreviation of the Latin phrase "quod erat demonstrandum" (literally, "that which was to have been demonstrated")

[citation needed [wikipedia.org]].

I'm guessing quod=what, erat=was-to-have-been, demonstrandum=demonstrated. So the Q. isn't quite D.E. (with emphasis on the E., I guess), as it's still to-be-shown.

You can mod me -1 Nitpicking People Called Romanes They Go The House now.

Re:I'm black.....

[NoPantsJim]

I have pants, I just refuse to wear them. ever.

Red vs Blue

[Anonymous Coward]

May I submit as evidence the Champions League Final? Manchester United (Red) vs. Chelsea (Blue)

Re:I disagree.

[eumaeus]

Latin nit-pick: quod = that which erat = was demonstrandum = a-to-be-demonstrated-thing The construction is the "passive periphrastic".

Re:Does Red Cost You More?

[rrhal]

... But my insurance company doesn't even ask what color my car is.

It's coded into your VIN.