Video: New Nike NFL ad wants to be fast
Boston boy who dodged bullet gets to meet his Celtics idol

Study: Teams that wear black uniforms get more penalties

By Tom Weir, USA TODAY

The Oakland Raiders may have an excuse for why they set NFL records for most penalties and most penalty yards last season.

A study of NHL teams has found that teams wearing black jerseys get the most penalties, and if that's true for hockey it probably applies to football and other sports, right?

The study, which will be published next month in the journal of Social Psychological and Personality Science, analyzed more than 50,000 NHL games over a quarter century, according to NPR's website. It found that teams were assessed 10.2% more penalty minutes while wearing black jerseys than when wearing other colors.

One explanation is that dark jerseys make a player more visible against the backdrop of white ice, and also make fouls easier to spot. A second possibility is that wearing dark colors makes a player more aggressive.

But University of Florida researcher Gregory Webster said it's possible that officials simply have an unconscious bias against black and other dark colors.

"There is this very strong cultural association that comes through in how we think about colors in terms of white being associated with good and black with bad," Webster told NPR. "Many of us are raised from childhood with some of these associations. And over time, we develop a kind of cognitive bias. That's been shown time and time again in social psychology."


Video: New Nike NFL ad wants to be fast
Boston boy who dodged bullet gets to meet his Celtics idol