Adam Alter: Drunk Tank Pink

Drunk Tank Pink is a shade of pink paint that psychologists used to use to paint the inside of jail cells. The prisoners that were put in there often the most dangerous and the most aggressive prisoners showed much less aggressive or violent tendencies as a result. Transcript Drunk Tank Pink is a shade of pink paint that psychologists used to use to paint the inside of jail cells. And in the 1960s a group of psychologists went around schools in Canada and they tried to find a color of paint that would pacify the aggressive students or the badly behaved students and would also improve their engagement in class. So they went and painted these school halls and these walls inside the school classrooms a whole lot of different colors. Sometimes they painted them pink, sometimes blue, sometimes yellow, sometimes green. They had theories about which colors would work best. And ultimately they found according to their results that pink was the best color. It had the greatest tende