If your less-than-desirable paper grade is circled in thick red ink, you may have more than just your own poor work to blame. Red ink encourages harsh grading, according to a study recently conducted by Tufts Department of Psychology graduate student Michael Slepian and Assistant Professor of Social Psychology at California State University, Northridge, Abraham Rutchick.
The idea that an everyday object can bring to mind a thought, feeling or experience is hardly novel, Slepian said. But the idea that such associations can subconsciously influence the way we interact with the world at large is a concept that's being developed in the scientific world more and more.
"A lot of previous stuff looks at how objects influence behavior," Slepian said. "Seeing a sports drink can give more endurance."
Slepian and Rutchick's study investigated the relationship between the use of red ink and the harshness of corrections and found that graders using red tended to grade more harshly when presented with both objective and subjective assignments.
As part of the study, the team gave the participants "word stems," tests involving incomplete words such as "FAI_," and asked them to fill in the blanks.
"People with a red pen were more likely to fill out ‘fail,' while those with a black pen might say ‘fair,'" Rutchick told the Daily. "The act of picking up a red pen activates this connotation of harshness."
The researchers also asked study participants to correct and grade sample essays for grammatical mistakes and writing style, separately, in order to measure the results for objective assignments against subjective ones. Slepian and Rutchick found that in both cases, those using red pens marked more errors than those using blue or black.
Because red is associated with harshness and low grades, Slepian said, he hypothesized that just the sight of red ink could give one cause to give an assignment a lower grade.
Rutchick was originally inspired to carry out the project by a student in one of his summer courses on social psychology at the Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. He was discussing the notion that simple objects can carry preconceived notions, connotations and associations when one of his students asked whether the concept could apply to red pens.
"I had this kind of ‘holy crap!' moment," Rutchick said. "We cancelled the final paper and spent the last few weeks developing this [idea] and testing it."
Rutchick had his students give acquaintances sample essays similar to those used in the controlled experiment and have them correct for errors using either red or different-colored pens. When the results came back and the red-ink users' papers were significantly more marked up and harshly graded, Rutchick realized the project's research potential.
Soon after, Rutchick asked Slepian, an old classmate — and, since, research partner — to get involved.
The study sought to illustrate scientifically what Ritchick's student noticed intuitively: that people tend to associate red ink with failure.
"If you pair two things together often enough, they become associated," Rutchick said. "Every time you see red ink on a paper, you think you messed up."
It seems almost inevitable that students would learn to associate red with a coming sense of failure, he explained — receiving a paper that looks as though it has been bled on is never the sign of a satisfying grade.
Of course, Rutchick is not the first psychologist to realize that associations can have powerful real-world effects, and Sam Sommers, associate professor of psychology at Tufts, was not surprised by the outcome of Rutchick's study.
"It makes sense that we have expectations built up over time for what certain groups and categories mean," he said. "The way a message is presented has meaning above and beyond the message itself; the mode of communication is often just as important."
The association of red ink with failure results from a self-sustaining cycle driven by teachers who use red ink to grade and were graded in red ink while they were growing up, Rutchick said.
"The thing with teachers is [that] they were students for 18 years too," he said; teachers who were graded harshly with red pens when they were students maintain the color's connotation of failure. This manifests in their grading, creates the association in their students' minds and perpetuates the association.
So what's so special about red? Nothing, Rutchick said; it is important to note that while the association may be passed on from generation to generation, there is nothing inherently special about the color.
"Purple could have the same effect if we use it for the next 15 years," he said.
While some may take the research as a cue to stop using red pens while grading, Marie-Pierre Gillette, a French lecturer at Tufts, sees even more reason to use red in light of the experiment results.
"[Students] have to be shocked so they don't make those mistakes again," Gillette said.
Sommers disagreed, explaining that he finds it important to reward students for their good work rather than punish them for their mistakes.
"It's very easy to focus on what's negative in a paper. [As teachers,] we should take the time to mark what's good," he said.
When grading, Sommers never subtracts from 100 percent but rather adds from zero, which he finds more encouraging.
"If that were to be the initial assumption, and a student loses credit, they'll be angry, but the other way around, students are more satisfied. I tell my [teaching assistants], when grading, you write ‘8 out of 10,' not ‘minus two,'" he said.
But, given that the research's findings are relatively recent, teachers often do not make an intentional choice when they pick up a pen to start grading, Gillette said.
"I don't say I'm going to use red pen," Gillette said. "It's whatever color pen I have at the time."
And even if they do have color preferences, they may not be cognizant of the association between red ink and harshness, Sommers said.
"I would bet substantial sums of money that if you asked teachers if they thought this made a difference, they would say no," he said.
While the evidence would prove these teachers wrong, Rutchick is worried that people might misinterpret the implications of the study as a warning to avoid red pens at all costs.
"Red pens aren't wrong; they just have an effect," he said. "For example, if you grade your own paper, you'd use a red pen so you could improve."
Rutchick would like to expand his research and study the adverse effects red ink may have on students, but right now there's no evidence to support his hunch that there is a connection.
Even without proof of red ink's possible effects, however, Rutchick explained that teachers must face the realization that something as common as red ink can have an uncommon effect on their work.
"The little ordinary things we take for granted often make a difference in ways we often don't expect," Sommers said.
