Winners Wear Red - Especially in MMA

Newscientist.com published a story  I found interesting for obvious reasons:

Imagine you are an experienced martial arts referee. You are asked to score a number of taekwondo bouts, shown to you on video. In each bout, one combatant is wearing red, the other blue. Would clothing colour make any difference to your impartial, expert judgement? Of course it wouldn't.

Yet research shows it almost certainly would. Last year, sports psychologists at the University of Münster, Germany, showed video clips of bouts to 42 experienced referees. They then played the same clips again, digitally manipulated so that the clothing colours were swapped round. The result? In close matches, the scoring swapped round too, with red competitors awarded an average of 13 per cent more points than when they were dressed in blue (Psychological Science, vol 19, p 769).

And, further down the story, referring to Olympic combat sports:

When they analysed the results they found that shirt colour appeared to influence the result, with nearly 55 per cent of bouts being won by the competitor in red. In closely fought bouts it was 62 per cent (Nature, vol 435, p 293). "It should have been roughly 50 per cent red, 50 per cent blue, and this was a statistically significant deviation," Barton says. "Skill and strength may be the main factors - if you're rubbish, a red shirt won't stop you from losing, but when fights were relatively symmetrical, colour tipped the balance."

The author goes on to offer a proposed explanation for the phenomenon:

In nature, red is often used to signal dominance and aggression, and in humans this is reinforced by cultural symbols such as warning signs and stop signals.

"Closely fought bouts....relatively symmetrical fights...."  Hmmm, sounds to me like split decisions in MMA.

More after the jump...

I decided to test the accuracy of this and its applicability to MMA. I decided to pick the biggest MMA organization in the world - the UFC - and decided to examine all events from 2008 and 2009 to date.

I set the ground rules as follows:

• I would look at all fights that ended in split decision or majority decision only.  No unanimous decisions, and of course no stoppages.
• I would consider a fighter to be "wearing red" if his trunks were entirely or substantially red.  Substantially means at least half the trunks are red; white trunks with lots of red lettering were not considered to be red.
• I would note who got the nod in the split decision and whether this was consistent with or violated the "winners wear red" theme; or whether there was "no action" meaning neither fighter was wearing red trunks.

The results once compiled were very surprising to me due to their absence of ambiguity:

By my count there have been 33 UFC events in 2008 and 2009 to date.  There have been 34 split/majority decisions.  Of these, 16 were "no action" meaning neither fighter wore trunks that were substantially or completely red.  Of the remaining 18 bouts, the fighter wearing red won 13 split decisions and lost 5.  This means that in the past 20 months of UFC fights, a fighter who wore red trunks won a split decision 72.2% of the time against an opponent not wearing red.

It's also worth noting that among the "no action" fights, there was a clearcut bias toward red; the fighter whose trunks contained more of the color tended to win more often than lose.  Only a couple of the "no action fights" were lost by a fighter whose trunks had more red than his opponent.

There were two fights in which one man's shorts were entirely red while his opponent's were half red.  The former won on both occasions.

Because I am a skeptic by nature, I was very surprised by these results even after having read the article. I find myself in agreement with the article's closing:

Given that the influence of colour on our behaviour is so prevalent, it's shocking that we aren't more aware of it.

I am guessing this topic is something about which most MMA competitors are probably unaware; but it appears to be a very real phenomenon with important implications for one's success in the sport in this age of increasing parity.