Date of Submission

Fall 2023

Academic Program

Psychology

Project Advisor 1

Justin Hulbert

Abstract/Artist's Statement

Warning signs are present in the day to day lives of most individuals. While there has been past research into what makes a warning sign more or less effective, there is still no clear answer as to what the most effective warning sign looks like. This study looks at specifically the words being used on a sign and the sign's color to determine which has a larger impact on the hazard perception of the sign. An online study was conducted in which participants were shown different signs and asked to rate how hazardous of a situation they thought each sign represents. Participants were shown eight different stimuli, ones with just the color red or blue, ones with just the word “danger” or “notice”, and ones with each combination of those colors and words. It was hypothesized that participants will find signs with the word “danger” more hazardous than signs with the word “notice”, find signs with the color red more hazardous than signs with the color blue, and finally that the color of the sign has a greater impact than the word on the individual’s perception of it’s hazard level. However, only the first two hypotheses could be supported with the data collected. Applications of the results of the study and directions for future study are discussed.

Open Access Agreement

Open Access

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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