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Why The Bride Wears White-Grounding Experiment

Decent Essays

Semin and palmer (2014) conducted a set of three experiments recorded in a paper titled “Why the bride wears white- Grounding gender with brightness”. Focusing mainly on the first of three experiments they presented thirty five students with a set of fourty names, half of which were male, and the other females. The names were either presented in black or white. The participants were offered payment for the experiment and were given a 800ms window to decide if the name belonged to a man or a woman and were instructed to be as fast and as accurate as possible. The data was analysed in a 2x2 repeated measures anova with names (Male, female) and colour (black and white) as the two variables. Reaction times that did not meet the 800ms limit were …show more content…

Taking for example the white virgin wedding dress, giving connotations of innocence and grace versus black police uniforms with adjectives such as authority and dominance (Sherman and glore, 2009). It was noted too then woman tend to have a lighter skin colour due to the production of vitamin D3 needed for pregnancy Jablonski (2004), and therefore this sexual dimorphism has created a schema which collaborates females and males with bipolar colours (Jablonski & Chaplin, 2000). This was shown in a study by Nestor and Tarr, (2008) who showed that participants use skin colour in gender recognition when participant are shown images of faces but no other gender queues such as facial …show more content…

Taking for example, the “Coca Cola” Corporation, when they released their diet cola, in silver cans it was popular with woman but not with males, noticing this, coca cola later released their coca cola zero, the cans were black and were much more popular with males (Semin and smith, 2013). This provides a rationale for the 2014 study by Semin and Palmer. However, by using only black and white colours as their independent variables they are limited in ecological validity. Although it may hold true for the coca cola industry, most things are made up of multiple colours not only black and white. Semin and Palmer also noticed this, and therefor carried out a second study using colour, however rather than using a range of colours they chose only one which they believed was not already tied to any gender (green) and then tested the participant’s reaction times using either a light or dark shade of green. They found that the reaction times for male names when presented in dark green was 453ms compared to 465ms for light green and 453ms for female names in light green compared to 460ms in dark green. This was a far more significant difference (13ms and 7ms compared to 10ms and 8ms for the black and white trial). This shows that the effects of grounding gender with brightness is a lot stronger when presented in colours as appose to black and white. However, a

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