How Blue Can Lead To True...

Blue is an analyst's colour, an overlooked pigment, and the discipline that has to come before any conclusion worth defending.

If you hand someone a red pen, it's interesting to watch what happens to them.

They start hunting and within a minute they are finding things wrong, which is a large part of the problem in any assessment or analysis. If you give the same person the same page and a blue pen instead, something different happens. They slow down. They mark what is interesting rather than what is broken. They ask more questions and reach fewer verdicts.

I have seen this in enough trainings now to have stopped being surprised by it. It is not a party trick. It is the reason every Truth Unlocked student starts in blue, before they touch a single advanced technique, and it is the reason five hundred blue highlighters are going out at CrimeCon London this October with nothing on them but a question.

Why am I blue?

Blue is almost absent from ancient Western art. The Greeks had little use for it and, by some accounts, thought it faintly barbaric. There is a long-running argument about whether Homer's “wine-dark sea” means the Greeks saw blue differently or simply named it differently, and I am not going to try to address that here. What is not in dispute is that for a very long stretch of Western history, blue was the colour nobody bothered with.

Then it rose. Through the medieval period it climbed steadily, became a royal colour in the twelfth century, and today it is the most popular colour in Europe and America, one people came to choose first when you ask them for a favourite. Michel Pastoureau tells the whole story in Blue: The History of a Color, and it is a better read than a book about one colour has any right to be.

Why not red ?

Red is the colour of correction. The red pen, the red flag, the red card. Psychologically, it is the colour of a mind already made up.

There is research suggesting this is not merely a matter of association ~ that red primes an avoidance mindset with attention narrowed onto faults, while blue primes a more open, exploratory frame. The best-known study is Mehta and Zhu, published in Science in 2009.

However, colour-priming research is not the sturdiest ground in psychology. A good deal of the wider field has struggled to replicate, and I would rather tell you that myself than have you discover it later and wonder what else I have oversold. So let me be precise about what I am claiming: the blue highlighter does not work because of a study, instead it works because of what a colour means to the person holding it, and because of the order it forces them into.

That distinction — between what the evidence supports and what we would like it to support — is not a footnote to this article. It is the subject of it.

What I can say without any hedging at all is this ~ an analyst has no business arriving in fault-finding mode when analysing a statement. At Truth Unlocked, I teach students to stay balanced, whatever they find. We do not tip the scale by asserting or suggesting guilt when something may jump-out at us. Instead, students who learn through us are trained to identify the anomalies in statements, and it is the imbalance and the layering of these anomalies that tips it, and our task is to notice when it does, not to lean on it.

Blue is the cool colour. The colour of depth and distance: water you cannot see the bottom of, hills that turn blue as they recede. It is what we reach for when we mean look further in, or stand further back. Blue is calm, measured, unhurried, exactly the disposition this work demands and why our analysts are not trained to provide 'judgement', but to identify and qualify critical anomalies using the principles taught, layering linguistic evidence and presenting them as questions, helping the investigator or the reader of our report to see the anomalies within a case, and provide crafted questions and rationale to progress it.

True blue

And blue carries one more meaning, older than any of this.

True blue is steadfast, genuine and unwavering.

The phrase is thought to come from Coventry cloth, dyed a blue so reliable it held its colour where other dyes ran. A true blue was one that did not fade under pressure.

That is what we ask of the analyst ~ before we ask anything at all of the statement. Blue does not lead to true because the colour is magic. It leads to true because of the sequence it imposes: our analysts are taught the discipline to mark before they interpret, to examine before they conclude, and it this that helps them find out what a statement is doing before they decide what it means. Doing it in this order ensures conclusions get sturdier. Skip a step and you get a verdict that will not hold its colour.

Convey, or convince ?

One of the first things our students learn is the difference between language that conveys and language that convinces.

A truthful account tends to convey. It moves through the event — what happened, when, who was there, what was seen. It has somewhere to be. A sensitive account spends more of its energy convincing. It explains and justifies. It manages what you think of the speaker while it is telling you what happened.

That does not make every explanation a lie. People explain things for all sorts of innocent reasons, and an analyst who treats every “because” as a confession will be wrong. However, marking these in blue makes it worth noticing and makes it worth revisiting.

Blue is how you see where a statement stops reporting and starts persuading.

What B.L.U.E. stands for:

B — Because. Reasons, explanations and justifications. Because, so, as, therefore, that's why. A reason may explain. It may also persuade. Mark it and find out which.

L — Language. Stay with the words. Not with assumptions about guilt, innocence, truth or deception. The statement is the evidence. It is also, very often, the only evidence you have.

U — Unlocks. Let the language show you where a person places importance, where they avoid detail, where they quietly put distance between themselves and something.

E — Evidence. Blue is not proof. It points to where evidence may be — areas to examine, questions to ask, patterns to weigh.

Because Language Unlocks Evidence.

Using blue literally offers us a blueprint, not a verdict.

There is a reason a blueprint is blue. A blueprint shows you the structure underneath a thing you would otherwise only see the surface of ~ load-bearing walls, where the weight actually sits and what is holding the building up, as opposed to what the façade

suggests is holding it up.

That is the claim statement analysis makes about a statement, and marking one in blue turns a block of text into something much closer to a map.

It has one more virtue, and it is the one I would defend hardest. A statement marked in blue shows it's working.

Anyone can see what was marked. Anyone can ask why. The reasoning is on the page rather than in the analyst's head, which means it can be challenged, and anything that cannot be challenged is not analysis, it is just an opinion with underlining.

A blue highlight is not a conclusion, but it is a question. The goal is not to catch people out, but to understand what a statement is really doing.

Before you interpret, you observe. Before you conclude, you examine. Before you accuse,

you understand.

Every Truth Unlocked student begins here ~ before the advanced techniques, before the conclusions, before deciding what anything means. You learn to BLUE the statement first.

The Complete Statement Analysis Course is where the rest of it lives, and is Peter Hyatt's original training. When Peter asked me to help with his trainings and support his students through his courses, it was a great honour. I've now taken his first course and put it onto an online platform, allowing learners to enjoy it at their own pace. I teach, support and guide all new analysts through each of the courses through to mastery.

Get the Complete Statement Analysis Course £299!

One honest warning comes with it. Once you have learned to see and hear things using statement analysis, you cannot unhear it. Most people find they are reading the news differently inside a fortnight, let alone what they see in things like true crime stories and in everyday life!

Every word matters. Learn to hear them all.

Paul Maillardet is the Director of Truth Unlocked and a member of the IAFLL and the I.A.C.A. He trained under the late Peter Hyatt and now teaches his courses. He is speaking at CrimeCon London on Saturday 3 October 2026.

Further reading: Michel Pastoureau, Blue: The History of a Color (Princeton, 2001). Ravi Mehta and Rui (Juliet) Zhu, “Blue or Red? Exploring the Effect of Color on Cognitive Task Performances,” Science, 2009.