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