Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of I Heart Radio,
Speaker 1: Hey brain Stuff Lauren vog obamb here. We humans all
Speaker 1: have a favorite color or colors, but historically it's been
Speaker 1: difficult to empirically explain why. It was easy to prove
Speaker 1: that people do like certain colors more than others, and
Speaker 1: research has shown that people often associate colors with feelings. However,
Speaker 1: because there was no standardization of colors or some smaller
Speaker 1: subset of colors for scientists to work with, no one
Speaker 1: could explain why we like certain colors. Enter Karen Schloss.
Speaker 1: As a child, her favorite activity was organizing her crayons. Today,
Speaker 1: Schloss is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology
Speaker 1: at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at the University of
Speaker 1: Wisconsin Madison, and has conducted critical studies on color preference.
Speaker 1: She said, I certainly have very strong color preferences that
Speaker 1: change aged over time, and these preferences influence a ton
Speaker 1: of decisions that we make, from the clothes that we wear,
Speaker 1: to the way we color our environments, and to the
Speaker 1: products we buy. With these influences in mind, she and
Speaker 1: her collaborator Stephen Palmer, PhD, a researcher at EC Berkeley
Speaker 1: set out to find why we like certain colors more
Speaker 1: than others. Through a series of lab studies between and seventeen,
Speaker 1: Schloss and Palmer hypothesized the ecological valence theory or e
Speaker 1: v T, which they describe in their paper as the
Speaker 1: theory that quote, people like slash dislike a given color
Speaker 1: to the degree that they like slash dislike all of
Speaker 1: the objects and entities that they associate with that color.
Speaker 1: For example, people often like blue hues because it reminds
Speaker 1: them of clear skies and clean water. On the other hand,
Speaker 1: people tend to shy away from brown hues because they
Speaker 1: remind us of feces or rotting food. That was their hypothesis,
Speaker 1: So where they right To explore this theory? Schloss and
Speaker 1: Palmer conducted a series of lab studies with several separate
Speaker 1: groups of participants who ranked color preferences, what colors made
Speaker 1: them think of certain objects, and if those objects represented
Speaker 1: positive or negative things. The result, they found that eight
Speaker 1: percent of the change in average color preferences from one
Speaker 1: group of people to another was based on how much
Speaker 1: other people like objects related to those colors. Shlas said,
Speaker 1: that's really cool. That's our first evidence that these patterns
Speaker 1: of color preferences can be explained by those objects associated
Speaker 1: with those colors. With this data, the pair could explore
Speaker 1: different topics of color preferences, like individual preferences, changes over time,
Speaker 1: or even cultural preferences. However, the results from the original
Speaker 1: study were only correlational. They didn't explicitly explain what causes
Speaker 1: someone to like a certain color or why that would
Speaker 1: change over time. Time for a different test, a, Schlas said,
Speaker 1: the idea is that if we bring to mind for
Speaker 1: you particular objects that are say positive and associated a
Speaker 1: particular color or negative, we should be able to change
Speaker 1: your color preferences over the course of even a laboratory experiment.
Speaker 1: And to test this, they presented participants with objects associated
Speaker 1: with the colors red and green. One group saw positive
Speaker 1: red images like strawberries and roses, but also negative green
Speaker 1: images like vomit and mucus. The second group saw the
Speaker 1: opposite and negative red images such as lesions and positive
Speaker 1: green images like forests and Kiwi's Shlas explained, what we
Speaker 1: found is that we were able to significantly increase people's
Speaker 1: preferences for the colors that were associated with the positive
Speaker 1: things they saw. If you saw positive red things, you
Speaker 1: could significantly increase your preference for the red colors. Then
Speaker 1: if you saw positive green things. Of course, positive and
Speaker 1: negative reactions aren't universal. Even though many people probably find
Speaker 1: red lesions to be gross, if a participant was pre med,
Speaker 1: for example, they might find red legions fascinating. And so
Speaker 1: the researchers next step was to see if they could
Speaker 1: predict how much a person's preference would change based on
Speaker 1: how much the person liked the images they saw. It
Speaker 1: turns out they could. Slaw said, if you activate the
Speaker 1: associations of particular objects, that can have a larger influence
Speaker 1: on your preference for the color. By activating, she means
Speaker 1: reminding you that an object exists, basically bringing it to
Speaker 1: the top of your mind. She continued, those objects are
Speaker 1: going to have more weight than the ones that I
Speaker 1: didn't activate. So if participants saw more positive images of
Speaker 1: red things, whatever those things were, they were more likely
Speaker 1: to have a positive association with the color red. This
Speaker 1: explains why a person may have This explains why a
Speaker 1: person may have paus of or negative feelings about certain colors.
Speaker 1: It comes down to your experience with objects of those
Speaker 1: colors over time and This may explain why yellowish, greenish colors,
Speaker 1: the colors of things like puss and vomit, are the
Speaker 1: least like across the world. According to Schlass, while blue
Speaker 1: hues are the most popular, blue is nearly always associated
Speaker 1: with universally positive things. In fact, in Schloss's studies, blue
Speaker 1: was the only color for which participants never listed a
Speaker 1: negative object. Scientists like Schlass have explored the idea that
Speaker 1: color preference may be part of our evolutionary design. She said.
Speaker 1: The idea is the color preferences act as a steering
Speaker 1: function that guides us towards things that are positive for
Speaker 1: our general health and well being and away from things
Speaker 1: that are negative. We have this learning mechanism to learn
Speaker 1: associations between colors and objects or concepts, and then use
Speaker 1: those to inform our judgments about colors. This could have
Speaker 1: been something that may have been adaptive for us to have. However,
Speaker 1: she points out that objects don't always have a rhyme
Speaker 1: or reason for their color, and in our relatively safe
Speaker 1: and curated world, it's often not a life or death
Speaker 1: preference for humans today, our choosing a color we like,
Speaker 1: for say, our love seat or cell phone case, may
Speaker 1: help us thrive, that is, be happy, and avoiding colors
Speaker 1: we dislike may help us avoid failure that is being unhappy,
Speaker 1: And even in that small way, the simple question what's
Speaker 1: your favorite color? May have more depth than we previously thought.
Speaker 1: Today's episode is based on the article science Explains Why
Speaker 1: we have favorite colors on how stuff works dot com,
Speaker 1: written by Alison Troutner. Brain Stuff is production by Heart
Speaker 1: Radio in partnership with how stuff works dot Com and
Speaker 1: is produced by Tyler Clang. For more podcasts by heart Radio,
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