Bulls care little about the redness of a matador’s cape. Psychologists have been pretty sure about that since 1923, when George M Stratton of the University of California published a study called The Colour Red, and the Anger of Cattle.
“It is probable,” Stratton opined, “that this popular belief arises from the fact that cattle, and particularly bulls, have attacked persons displaying red, when the cause of the attack lay in the behaviour of the person, in his strangeness, or in other factors apart from the colour itself. The human knowledge that red is the colour of blood, and that blood is, or seemingly should be, exciting, doubtless has added its own support to this fallacy.”
Stratton, aided by a Miss Morrison and a Mr Blodgett, conducted an experiment…
So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.