I was wondering why colors affect our choices, because they shouldn't, right? But imagine your at a smoothie shop and both smoothies are the same flavor only one of them is bright green and the other is dark brown. You would probably pick the green one. Today we’re going to learn why.
Color preferences are strongly correlated to emotional response. For some people it would be horrible to paint their walls bright red and some people pay for bright red walls.
In an article from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science they did a study that human color choices are adaptive. They asked 48 participants to rank 32 different colors from worst to best in their opinion. The results showed that brighter and neon colors were vastly more popular than dull and muted colors. Brown was way less preferred than orange and yellow. Bright reds, Blue and Green were the most popular. The researchers soon found out that the problem wasn’t with the colors because since brown was the least popular it doesn't always have that effect. For example if you see chocolate milk that is brown it won't have the same repulsion effect as a brown smoothie.
What the researchers did is they showed the participants color swatches against a grey background and told them to write down objects they associate that color with (Red could be apple and brown could be dirt). As a result the researchers now had 222 objects and their associated colors. With a new 98 participants they showed each person the name of the object on a piece of paper and ranked them on a scale of 1-10. For the 98 participants no colors were shown.
The researchers then showed 31 new observers the written descriptions of the objects together with a color to which that object had been given, and asked them to rate the strength of the match between the color and the described object.
In short, what the study showed is that colors are deeply connected with the objects in our everyday life. For instance if someone doesn’t like bananas, they might not like the color yellow as much as someone who eats them everyday. This can be influenced by anything, even house paint, clothes, or furniture.
Comments