Despite what Barbie and her dream house would have you believe, women aren’t too keen on pink.
A new study published in the Harvard Business Review shows the color pink might actually be detrimental to breast-cancer awareness campaigns, causing women to react defensively.
The color makes women less likely to take action to detect cancer in themselves, and less likely to give money to fight the disease.
Why? Turns out, pink is like a pointing finger that says, “I’m coming for you.”
From the Harvard Business Review:
Stefano Puntoni ran a battery of experiments in which he primed women with gender cues by, for example, showing them ads dominated by the color pink or asking them to write essays on gender. He then asked them to rate how likely they thought they were to contract breast cancer or to give money to efforts to eradicate ovarian cancer. The women primed with gender cues were far less likely than the control group to think they’d get cancer—and far less likely to donate.
That finding was the opposite of what Puntoni thought his research would conclude. He writes:
In psychology, there’s a lot of literature on defensive responses. How do we deal with threatening ideas, with things that are existentially difficult to comprehend? What happens is, these set off very strong denial mechanisms. By adding all this pink, by asking women to think about gender, you’re triggering that. You’re raising the idea that this is a female thing. It’s pink; it’s for you. You could die. The cues themselves aren’t threatening—it’s just a color! But it connects who you are to the threats.
Read more from the Harvard Business Review.