Dear authors of study: Sex and gender are not interchangeable words. Did you divide people up by their personal identity? Use gender. Did you divide them up based on what genitals they were born with? Use sex. And don't try to tell me that rats have gender.

Also, if you're going to draw random conclusions about in-utero hormone exposure linking up with human color preferences, please actually study in-utero/prenatal hormone exposure in your subjects. Thanks.

I would interpret it this way: Blue is the prettiest color and more women know this than men. My interpretation is not very serious. It is biased because I like blue.

Huh. My favorite color is orange.

Does that make me a hermaphrodite, or an alien?

Another case of universalizing modern Western/American norms.

Among other ridiculousness. Their logic is "rats like the way things taste based on sex, and humans like the ways things look based on...gender (or maybe sex?), therefore the same thing causes both." ??? Seriously? Am I reading that wrong?

green is my favourite colour. being from India, I had recently visited my family there a few weeks ago. While there, I noticed a lot of Indian men wearing pink.

There could be a slight underlying biological issue, in that males are more likely to be red-green colorblind. Of course, it doesn't seem to have affected the preference for red.

No one's favorite is black?

Lisa--you said it!!!!

I guess they weren't allowed to list black as a color or something? I can't imagine that 0 people said "black."

Wow, the "interpretation" by the study authors is totally illogical.

Biologically based color preference, huh? I guess because these particular color preferences are obviously cross-cultural and true throughout all of history, that's a logical interpretation...oh, wait, did they forget that part of the study?

What about the green? That seems like a fairly significant difference (as opposed to red, for example).

I do know that women can actually see more colors than men, which might account for the diversity. However, that refers to specific shades, not the 'red-blue-green' typical colors.

Ooh, even better explanation: women in the past needed to forage for berries, therefore they're naturally more likely to favour pink shades!

I <3 Ev Psych. No, really, there was a study a while back that actually asserted that. Men, then, presumably prefer blue because, erm... all those bright blue woolly mammoths they were hunting or something.

I pretty well refused to wear pink until I was out of high school. I felt I was supposed to like it, being a girl and all. So therefore, I hated it.

Heh, my avatar is pink. :)

http://blog.xkcd.com/2010/03/01/color-name-survey/
I think the interesting dynamic is not just men liking blue, but rather women being much more involved in color overall.

The higher percentage of women liking pink or purple is expected enough: most of the men who prefer it wouldn't admit it, for the reasons you gave.
But what about the greater preference, among women, for green? That, along with pink and purple, almost totally accounts for the lower percentage choosing blue, as compared to men. Here's a theory, off the top of my head:
maybe humans in general initially prefer blue, for some survival related reason (water, clear skies?), but women, being encouraged by society to engage in more activities that involve choosing and comparing colors (fashion, interior decorating, etc.) are more likely to change their initial preference (from trends, cultural associations or plain old desire for variety), hence the greater diversity in favorite colors among the women overall.
Hey, it's pulled out of thin air, but so is their "neurohormonal" explanation.

can I just ask WTF taste has to do with color? why are the authors asserting that a rat's gender-based preference for tastes has anything to do with people's preference for color?

Because all I can think of now is "purple is a fruit" :-p

Everyone who is involved in evo psych research should be required to do a second degree in sociology first. There, I said it. The wild leaps to hormonal causes and selection during some unspecified "caveman era" are embarrassing, especially to anyone who's studying evolution for real.

I find it interesting that so few women picked pink, yet the "girl version" of everything is ALWAYS pink or maybe lavender. This is especially true of young children. It's hard to find any female-gendered products for babies and little girls that are green or blue.

I don't think blue or green are particularly masculine, unless we're talking about babies, but it depends on the shade. Anyway, I think it's natural to like green and blue as these are the colors which form the backdrop in nature.

If you want an actually interesting look at differences in people's perceptions of color, check out the survey results from XKCD's poll: http://blag.xkcd.com

The sample population was undergraduates. I wonder how these researchers controlled for university colors. For example, if you were to walk around the University of Michigan campus during the regular term, you would find a lot of yellow and blue (the colors of the university). One would see similar color associations at other campuses.

If the study was done at Minot State University, that could go some way to explaining the green (Minot State's colors are red and green).

I wonder also about the psychology of colour - do more people like blue because it's more calming? I don't know if that's the case, but is there something that makes certain colours more attractive than others?

IMO, these "female humans prefer pink" conclusions fall down, once you look back only 100 years and see several publications in English advising that boy babies should be in pink and girl babies in blue.

The gendering of colours is cultural, it changes, and we're all soaking in it.

The cheese, however, does.

Aren't many men color blind?

i've read that blue and green are the colors most humans prefer as they are the color of the sky,many bodies of water and most plantlife

i always say that men LOVE pink,lace,satin and ribbons thats why women wear it. it doesnt reflect our tastes so much as it does those of the gender we're expected to attract

My interpretation: Blue and green are interpreted as calming, relaxing, and unoffensive colors in our culture. They are thus very popular with both genders in Western, American culture-- something reflected in everything from cars and the color we paint our walls to school and team colors.

However, men are more inclined to cling to gender norms and want to have the masculine color, blue-- they may also care less, and pick blue because they don't have a favorite color and it's a popular color, while women are encouraged to care about colors and shades from a young age and thus are less likely to go with the default.

An informal survey of my friends reveals that most of them interpret blue as the most common favorite color, so maybe guys were thinking "I guess I like blue, everyone likes blue."

Heh.

Most mammals are red-green colour-blind. They don't see red. Except for great apes. And some new world monkeys, but only the female ones. Male humans are often red-green colour-blind, and there's evidence that a great many of them are sort of colour deficient in that way, seeing fewer shades of reds, and fewer shades in general.

http://www.asu.edu/news/research/womencolors_090104.htm

If you told me you were doing this study I would have hypothesized, based on this information about mammalian colour-vision, that you would find that women have a wider variety of favourite colours and that men more rarely have a favourite colour that includes reddish tones. Which is exactly what you got. I would speculate that pinks and purples look less interesting to men.

(My childhood dog showed a marked colour preference for blue. If you put a red or pink scarf on him, he'd take it off and bury it. If you put a blue one on, he'd look enormously pleased and leave it on. Blue and lemon-yellow look bright and colourful to dogs. Reds and pinks probably look like muddy greens and mustard colours, depending on the shade. I didn't know that at the time. Now I have the amusing realization that my dog was actually rejecting reds and pinks because they didn't look vivid, while I reject them because they are too vivid.)

Reading the evo-psych explanation, I wonder how they'd interpret answers if they could sample the colour preferences of a group of ancient Greeks - living in a civilization which didn't even have a word for "blue".

hnk vcg

The data as presented in the post supports neither explanation. My interpretation would be that slightly more men than women like blue and slightly more women than men like pink.

Their explanation that this is likely to be neurohormonally caused also implies that it's not socially caused. But they aren't able to eliminate this factor because they don't treat it as a variable, because they don't really vary it ("a large sample of North American college students" in or around 2001 only includes societies that match your description e.g. blue gendered masculine, femininity devalued etc.). To deny the influence of a factor that you didn't actually test for is bad science, whatever discipline you're in.

Actually, based on the evidence from this study, the only interpretation that can be provided is that there may be some factors that produce slight differences in colour preference between male and female North American college students. There is nothing in the study that suggests a link with neither culture and social environment nor biology or genetics.

When all you have is a hammer...

This is a great example of why liberal arts requirements at colleges are important. You've got to fill your tool box with all kinds of paradigms.

This varies by culture. Some colors are preferred by different cultures. Where did this survey/data come from

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