Many effects of colors on humans have been frequently researched by the scientific community before. In fact, today almost every brand has its own unique color and certain emotions it evokes. The biggest example of this today is that red symbolizes love and passion; We can say that blue evokes calmness and peace.
Of course, it may vary from person to person, but in general, this is the feeling that the effect of these colors on people evokes in many people. So, what do pink and prisons have in common? Do you think this color started to be used in wards?
Between the 1960s and 70s, researcher Alexander Schauss decided to investigate the psychological and physiological effects of pink on humans.
Schauss, who claimed to have found a shade of pink he called P-618 in the late 1970s, claimed that this color had a significant effect on reducing heart rate, pulse and respiration compared to other colors. Of course, this was just a claim and he also had to perform an experiment to strengthen his theory.
To test his theory, Schauss convinced Chief Warden Gene Baker and Captain Ron Miller of the Naval Prison in Seattle, USA. (Even the name of Baker-Miller pink comes from these two men.)
The results of the research conducted on March 1, 1979 are quite surprising.
Half of the prisoners were asked to look at the pink cardboard and the other half to look at the dark blue cardboard. Exactly one minute later, Schauss asked the inmates who were looking at the pink cardboard to raise their arms in front of their bodies, then applied pressure to their arms and asked them to lower them back to their sides.
Schauss asked the same thing to happen to the prisoners who looked at the dark blue cardboard, and then started to monitor the behavior of the male prisoners. And yes, just like Schauss’s theory, pink really did work.
Immediately after this experiment, there was no hostile behavior among the inmates in the prison. According to the results of the experiment, prisoners only needed to be exposed to Baker-Miller color for 15 minutes to calm down.
This color has 2 different names: one is drunk pink and the other is Schauss pink. We understand Schauss, but what about drunks?
The term “drunk tank”, used as slang in English, means a detention center where people who consume alcohol and disrupt the peace of the society are kept. Small county jails were sending drunk people who disturbed the public peace to pink holding cells; As a result, the slang term “drunk tank” has emerged among the public day by day.
Seeing that the pink color worked, the authorities started a pink craze and painted the environment Baker-Miller pink. For example, in Texas, in 2006, prisoners who committed repeated crimes were transferred to pink cells and wore pink prisoner uniforms.
In fact, this issue has become so big among prisons that some prisons are literally turning the wards into children’s rooms and even putting a teddy bear in the room. Mike Rackley, the sheriff in the Dallas region of Missouri, made a statement on this issue:
“Basically, if they’re going to act like a child and do a childish act, then we’re going to create a childish atmosphere. Also, it’s a calming thing, teddy bears are soothing. So we made it like a nursery, it’s kind of a nursery for adults who can’t control their behavior in public.” .”
So what does current research say about this issue?
By 2014, Swiss psychologist Oliver Genschow from Ghent University claimed the exact opposite of Schauss’s research. In the research he and his team conducted, they randomly selected 59 inmates who had violated prison rules, and half were sent to pink cells and the other half to gray/white cells.
After 3 days of observation, less aggressive behavior was observed in the prisoners staying in the pink cell. Even though it contradicts today’s times, Genschow and his team predicted that “the color pink may go against the perception of masculinity and cause feelings of humiliation.”
However, it should not be forgotten that this experiment may also include cultural differences. For example, while this experiment does not yield any results in many countries where the color pink is associated with femininity, the result may be different in countries where it evokes different things. Today, there is still no definitive judgment on this issue, and you can even try this experiment at home when you are most angry.
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