Colour preference

What surveys find

Studies going back to the 1940s report a rough order of blue, then red or green, then purple, orange and yellow. This holds in many places but not all, and most of the data come from students in wealthy countries. Preference is not just about hue. People on average prefer saturated colours to greyish ones and, for most hues, lighter to darker. Small children favour bright reds and yellows more than adults do. Preferences shift over a lifetime and with fashion, as the changing colours of cars and kitchens show.

Why blue, and why not brown

In 2010 the American psychologists Stephen Palmer and Karen Schloss proposed that people like a colour to the degree that they like the things that have it. Blue goes with clear sky and clean water. Dark yellow-brown goes with rot and waste. They asked people to list objects for each colour and rate how much they liked the objects, and those ratings predicted colour preference well. The idea also explains local loyalties: in their studies, students tended to like their own university's colours more than a rival's.

Men, women and culture

A British study in 2007 reported that women's preferences leaned a little further towards reddish hues than men's, and suggested an evolutionary cause. Later studies in other cultures did not find the same pattern, including work with Himba people in Namibia, which points to learning instead. Preference is also tied to meaning. A colour that is lucky, sacred or associated with a favourite team gains from it. Asking for a single favourite hides all this. The same person may love red on a festival day and never paint a room in it.

Sources and further reading

• Color preferences on Wikipedia
• Palmer and Schloss, An ecological valence theory of human color preference, PNAS (2010)
• Schloss and others, Effects of university affiliation and school spirit on color preferences (2011)