The Psychology of Colors
It is a widely known conception that colors have been used for a very long time to imbue the human psyche with certain thoughts and emotions. The color of everything we see around us that is marketed — but not necessarily just marketed — to us has been carefully selected to connect with a part of our brain and elicit a certain response. From pills to food packaging, to streetlights, and more, the colors we see in our life are deliberately chosen to either improve our quality of life or market a certain item to us. Many people may also be aware of the general meanings and symbolism behind colors. Yellow represents happiness, but it also represents low quality in the marketing world. Red represents lust and aggression, green represents eco-friendly things and envy, and blue represents masculinity, calmness, and high quality. Pink represents sophistication and femininity, and purple represents authority and power. Orange represents warmth and excitement, while brown represents ruggedness. Black represents grief, expensiveness, fear, and death, while white represents happiness, sincerity, and purity.
One example of color affecting the way we perceive things is the supposed fact in the car industry that red cars are more expensive to insure in Canada and America. I found out about it through word of mouth from a friend. After one Google search, I was able to determine that that is indeed a myth. Many people are unaware that it is untrue and continue to believe it.
This article:
speaks in length about the topic and mentions how Geico, the insurance company, has released a statement saying: “A red car won’t cost you more than a green, yellow, black or blue car. Insurers are interested in the year, make, model, body type, engine size, and age of your vehicle. How you’re perceived based on the color of your car is another matter,”. The reason that people believe it is true is because of the common conception of red as a risky, aggressive, and speedy color. Drivers of red cars are perceived as great risk-takers and aggressive drivers.
Another example that people may not be aware of is that in Japan, in around the early 2000s, several Japanese railways installed blue streetlights in an attempt to curb and reduce suicide rates, as many people in Japan committed suicide by jumping in front of the trains in railway stations.
The full article can be found here:
The idea of using blue lights instead of any other color stems from multiple studies done that have proven that participants fall into a state of relaxation when they enter a room that is lit up with blue lights. Another study has also proven that people in blue-lit rooms work more productively. A study in 2013 collected data from the past 13 years and established that after blue streetlights were introduced in the early 2000s, suicide rates fell by 84%. Blue, with its relaxing properties, is not only used to prevent suicides. You may have noticed that a lot of famous companies use varying shades of blue in their logos. That is determined by multiple factors. One is that many studies have shown the color blue to be the most favorable amongst the population of the United States of America. The second ties back to the streetlights, and it is that the color blue evokes a sense of peace, tranquility, and relaxation.
Cars and streetlight colors are not the only ones to leave an impression on people.
An article, linked here:
mentions a study that states, with relation to pill colors that, “red, yellow, and orange are associated with a stimulant effect, while blue and green are related to a tranquilizing effect.” Patients’ preconceived notions of the pill due to its color have been shown to have an impact on how effective they are when taken, thus indicating a placebo effect.
The question now stands, is our perception of colors based on nurture or nature? Are we born to perceive colors a certain way or do we learn to?
According to this article, in the Los Angeles Times:
“Women’s brains seem to be hard-wired to prefer lavender, and men’s tend toward blue”. This information was based on a study that a group of British neuroscientists had conducted, lead by Dr. Anya Hulbert. “Hulbert […] showed 171 white Britons and 37 recent Chinese immigrants a pair of colored rectangles, on a computer screen and asked them to click on their preferred color as quickly as possible. The subjects were shown about 1,000 pairs of colors.” The scientists had guessed that if color preference was based on culture, the Chinese people would have picked red the most, as it is a symbol of good luck in their culture. The results of the study were that both the Britons and the Chinese were very attracted to blue, “although the Chinese tended to favor slightly more reddish hues”. The article then goes on to discuss the differences in color preferences between men and women. “Women consistently favored more reddish tints, regardless of their cultural background. […] Men had a penchant for blue-green hues, picking sky blue most often,”. “Hulbert surmised that women may have evolved an interest in red because of their primary role as gatherers in early human history.” The study mentioned in this article proves that a huge part of color perception is inherent, or determined by nature, rather than nurture.
Examples such as the experiment where people would walk into a room with entirely blue light and enter a relaxed state are universal. Our subconscious brain is hard-wired to trigger similar, if not the same, reactions to at least the primary colors such as red, blue, and yellow, regardless of cultural impact. That, however, does not stop certain biases from developing as one goes through life. Linked here is an article, regarding color symbolism theories, that explains color symbolism in the context of multiple different factors that may affect it such as cultural associations, political and historical associations, religious and mythical associations, linguistic associations, and contemporary usage and fads:
Though there is evidence that nature plays a part in our perception of colors, it is simply linked back to evolutionary theories, such as women being gatherers in old times and gravitating towards the color red as it most likely stood for berries that they could consume. The nurture aspect of color perception is very complex and multifaceted. It depends on all of the factors listed above and much more. Here is another article, by the title of “How Translating Colors Across Cultures Can Help You Make a Positive Impact”, that goes into detail about the meaning of colors in different cultures:
What is interesting, though, is that while some cultures’ identities revolve around colors, there exists at least one culture where they do not have a word for the concept of color. In the article “Do You See What I See?”, anthropologist Alexandre Surrallés uncovers a tribe “in the Candoshi village in the heart of Peru” of about 3,000 people who don’t have conventional words for colors like westerners or other cultures do. He had placed a colored chip on a table and asked, in their language, “What color is this? […] a lively discussion erupts between two Candoshi about whether the chip, which Surrallés would call amber or yellow-orange, looks more like ginger or fish spawn. […] His fieldwork led Surrallés to the startling conclusion that these people simply don’t have color words: reliable descriptors for the basic colors in the world around them. Candoshi children don’t learn the colors of the rainbow because their community doesn’t have words for them.”. Despite how outlandish his conclusion might seem, Surrallés is one of many anthropologists who have discovered tribes in all corners of the world that do not have reliable descriptor words for color in their vocabulary.
This article goes into depth about the two sides “of an ongoing war in the world of color research”. The first side is the universalists — who believe that all people see colors the same way — and the second side is relativists, who believe that the perception of color is a spectrum and that westerners should not force their interpretation of color onto others’ cultures. It is apparent that the argument of whether color perception is determined by nature or nurture is more than skin-deep and is, in fact, very convoluted. There are a lot of factors that have to be taken into account to reach a conclusion. Therefore, to test out how colors affect me personally in my everyday life, I decided to conduct an experiment on myself.
I found out that my iPhone had a greyscale filter and applied it to my phone for twenty-four hours. The first big change I noticed was obviously that the blaring red notifications that had previously caught my attention were almost nowhere to be seen. Instead, I was greeted by an entirely grey screen where even clicking the applications did not seem, for lack of a better word, appetizing to me. Whereas I would usually have clicked mostly blue or green icons, (WhatsApp, Twitter, Instagram) I found myself equally not tempted to click anything. As an artist who follows many other artists, I would go on my social media accounts to look at others’ digital art, only to find it lacking in color and very bland. I knew I was not getting to experience their art in its full capacity and it made it very discouraging to scroll through social media. Another big change I noticed was when I was watching YouTube videos to fall asleep. In YouTube videos, there is usually a red bar at the bottom of the screen that shows your progress in watching a video. In greyscale mode, that red bar had blended into the background and I could not tell which part of the video I was in unless I checked the time. The process itself of watching videos without color was almost torturous. Before trying this out, I had taken all the colors I was able to see around me for granted. I found that using my phone without colors provided a minuscule amount of the whole experience, and it overall discouraged me from checking or using my phone in general. My screen time had also gone down the day I set the filter, from an average of seven hours and a half to almost five hours.
Overall, it is no surprise that color is a very important part of our lives, from essentials to medicine, to entertainment. A lot of people take the existence of color in their lives for granted, I know I did. The successful application of color psychology has been proven to save lives, boost pharmaceuticals’ effects, and skyrocket a company into success. While our subconscious brain’s response to colors may be universal and determined by nature, our conscious perception of color is also partially determined by nurture, going off of many factors such as culture, religion, language, politics, and pop culture. These matters are still being debated in the world of color research, and with such a nuanced, multiplex topic, they may debate it for ages to come.
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