I found this article really interesting; it is about our color preferences. Why do you think we like certain colors? Is it learned or inherited? A study is shown in the article that ultimately comes to the conclusion that whenever we see a color, like red, we will associate the color with an image, an apple. This makes our color preferences greatly influenced by what we have been exposed to, so then do you think color preference is culturally influenced like the article stated? The article also talks about how people would quickly reject drinking a brown tomato juice, since all we have ever seen is bright red tomato juice. But if we had only seen dingy brown tomato juice we would not think twice about drinking. This shows how color preference is greatly ruled by the unconscious, so are there any foods that you can think of being a different color that would make you hesitate eating them?
Link: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-new-brain/201104/why-we-prefer-certain-colors
I think we like certain colors because of things we learned and been through. Also, I feel we like and dislike certain colors because of experiences we have had with them. For example, if we had a bad experience with color red, particularly with blood then I feel that people would tend to hate that color growing up and associate the color red with blood instead of let’s say an apple. I think it tends to sway towards our first experience or memory with a certain color. I think color preference could be culturally influenced because different cultures are exposed to different colors in their houses, food, cars, etc. I definitely would not drink a brown tomato juice because I am so used to seeing it as a bright red. I do think that if we were only exposed to brown tomato juice then we would be more reluctant to drink it if it were red. I know back when I was little and they came out with the green ketchup I never wanted to try it. I was so used to seeing and eating things with red ketchup that when I did try the green ketchup I put thoughts in my head that it tasted different just because it “looked” different. Our color preferences are greatly ruled by the unconscious because I am hesitant to eat foods that are different from their regular color.
ReplyDeleteOnce I started to read this article, I was reminded of a Tyra show episode that was on this past week in which they had a guest speaker, a ‘colorologist,’ come in and explain why certain people are attracted to certain colors. For example, have you ever noticed how many fast food restaurants use the color red somewhere in their logo? Wendy’s, McDonalds, KFC, Pizza Hut. Apparently, seeing the color red sparks a person’s appetite, thereby making them hungry and wanting to purchase food from the fast food restaurant. There is a psychology behind color choices. I definitely agree with the author’s point that no one would ever dare to drink brown tomato juice. Let’s be honest – if someone handed me an orange banana, I’d be a little hesitant about eating it. I remember when my mother brought home yellow carrots to cook for dinner and the whole family was just completely weirded out. I think this whole concept goes along with our ideas of categories and prototypes. If something does not match our mental image, our prototype, of what we think it should look like, we stop to reevaluate it.
ReplyDeleteIn a sense, I also feel that a liking of certain colors is socially prescribed based on gender. It is very uncommon that we would see a mother painting her newborn son’s nursery in a shade of pink or purple. We’ve grown up learning that pink is for girls and blue is for boys. Again, to see anything that is out of the ordinary makes us feel uncomfortable. We all have a ‘favorite’ color, but I think colors play a far bigger role in our lives than just a simple preference. I can’t speak for everyone, but I know that when I am choosing which brand of product to purchase, I choose the one with the most colorful packaging, even if it is more expensive. U by Kotex tampons anyone? Overall, I don’t think anyone will willingly choose to drink brown tomato juice or eat a black apple anytime soon. Congrats, artificial colors.
I personally can never pick one favorite color, it's so difficult! But I do like bright colors such as lime green and hot pink. These colors always seem to make me happy and "brighten" my mood. I think our preference for colors is learned. Like the study from the article, we learn to associate colors with images that we have been exposed to. Therefore, our color preference is culturally influenced because different people from different area associate colors with different images. I think that the images we associate with a certain color play a huge role in our liking of that certain color. For instance, the color red can be see in two ways depending on the image a person associates with it. A person could love red because they associate it with the image of a delicious red apple. Or a person could hate red because they associate it with blood. This happens with many colors.
ReplyDeleteI think that just like the brown tomato juice mentioned in this article, I would not want to eat any food that is different from its normal color. If someone were to hand me a red cucumber, there is no way I would eat it! When we are presented with food different from its normal color, we are most likely to question it.
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ReplyDeleteThere isn’t any rational behind our reasons for liking the colors we like. If someone asks us why pink is our favorite color we would be unable to come up with any reason. We can’t explain why we like certain colors and dislike other colors. That’s just the way it is. Colors definitely do play into our unconscious minds. We do not sit down and thoroughly think about why we like a certain color, we just like it. Evidence that color preferences are a cultural phenomenon can especially be seen in little kids. Whenever I ask my 4 year old cousin what her favorite color is, she always replies with, “Pink, because I’m a girl.” It confuses her to hear her old sister (9 years old), report that her favorite color is blue. In her mind this doesn’t make sense, because she is a girl and she should like pink. This stereotypical color preference is instilled in children as early as birth. Baby boys get blue. Baby girls get pink. At baby showers, when the sex of the baby is unknown, everything is decked out in yellow. We are not born liking certain colors. We learn to like certain colors based on what they mean to us.
ReplyDeleteI always have the hardest time picking out colors when I go to the nail place. When I walk in there are certain colors that I don’t even bother to look at it. These usually consist of the dark browns, blacks, and ugly greens. I usually go for the brighter colors but lately I have been getting more neutral colors. I am not sure why I feel a liking towards these colors, but I do know that I was not born with it set in my mind. I think that the color of your nail affects the mood you’re in, or as the article said what you associate the color with. My ex-boyfriends mom always had the color wicked on her nails, and before the breakup this was one of my favorite colors. However, now I would never even think to get my nails this color because I associate the color with his mom, and that’s just, well weird.
I think Mariel is definitely right in bringing up the cultural aspect that may play into our likes and dislikes of certain colors. In certain cultures one color may represent a positive purification or growth of an individual, whereas that same color may have a reverse meaning somewhere else in the world.
ReplyDeleteWhen you really think about it, there is no merit behind why we do and do like colors. What's your favorite color? Mine's pink, but why? I really don't have a solid reason for liking pink--I just do.
I think the situation lends itself to certain colors as well. Like Alyssa pointed out, when we go to the nail salon, it's always a huge decision we have to make in deciding what color we should choose (as if we couldn't change it in a couple weeks anyway). I went prom dress shopping today (surprisingly it didn't take as long as it usually does), but I had an overall idea of what I wanted. There were so many dresses and so many colors. Some dresses were cute, but I didn't like the colors, so I didn't try them on. Who knows..maybe I would have liked the way one of those dresses fit, but because of the color, I was immediately turned off.
It was interesting to read that our subconscious can drive our decisions so strongly, even when it comes to a color. It made me think, were certain colleges not as desireable to me because of their colors?? Hmmm....
Really interesting article, Catie! As soon as I started reading, I couldn't help but think back to my eighth grade science fair project...I kid you not. It makes sense when you know what question I had decided to address: Does preference have an effect on unconscious action? Okay, maybe it makes more sense when you know that I had picked color as the device for which I could measure preference. Here's how I carried out the experiment -- I had a bowl full of differently-colored small beads, and had mixed them all randomly. I then had my participants, in 60 seconds, put the beads in another bowl as quickly as they could, picking up only one bead at a time. While their consciousness was directed on another task (moving as many beads as they could, thinking that I was measuring reflexes or speed or something), I was curious to see if they were unconsiously drawn to & picked up the beads that were their favorite colors. What I eventually found was that no, there was no correlation between preference and unconscious action. But this article, and particularly the experiement it describes, makes me take a step back to all of that research I did four years ago for my dinky project. The colors of the beads were not linked to any objects other than simply the beads. It may be that we have an equal preference for a bead any color because they work well in different situations (i.e. a brown beaded necklace may go well with a mainly brown outfit, a blue beaded bracelet may be preferred with a blue outfit). But if I had paired the colors with different flavors -- say, Skittles -- would my results have been different? Now the preferences are unbalanced because we associate flavor with the object. For me, cherry-flavored candy is much more preferable to banana-flavored candy, especially since I had an experience where I got sick after eating a banana; this change could have altered my conclusion. Overall, t's just really interesting to see how experience links to preference, and how color links to that.
ReplyDeleteWhenever people ask me what my favorite color is, I always seem to have a different one every month! I don’t know what it is, I just always thought it depended on the mood I was in. I definitely agree that the unconscious has a huge role in choosing your favorite color because when people ask me why I chose a certain color as my favorite I never know. It is so difficult to explain why someone chooses a color as their favorite unless you associate it with something very desirable. This brings up the idea that color preferences are greatly influenced by what we have been exposed to. When I was reading this article, all I kept thinking about was in Kindergarten and 1st Grade when we would read Green Eggs and Ham and the class mom would always bring in green eggs to go with it. I was absolutely repulsed by the green eggs and it is simply because I am so used to them being yellow. I know that the die does not do a thing to the taste but I could not get over the fact that they were green. It is so interesting how affected we are because of the fact that the colors are so programmed in us to certain objects.
ReplyDeleteLike the article and everyone else has said, we associate certain colors with certain objects and when the expected color of something does not match its actual color, we get grossed out or confused. I'm a picky eater, so I think this affects me even more. My dad, on the other hand, is like a human garbage disposal...he eats basically everything! So I think that the extent to which colors or appearances of foods affect our preference for them depends on not only the color but also an individual's personality traits. While I wouldn't go near brown tomato juice, I have a feeling that my dad would not care as much about the color as long as he knew that the taste was the same.
ReplyDeleteAnother important aspect I thought this article brought up was how companies manipulate customers' color preferences. How often do we choose one brand over the other brand because of the colors on the labels or packaging. It sounds ridiculous to think that's actually how we make decisions, but it definitely plays a role. The "happier" and brighter colors are more likely to catch our attention than duller colors, and I think we're more likely to be attracted to products that stand out from the crowd or products with colors that we unconsciously associate with positive events or ideas in our lives...and this changes from person to person.
I found this article particularly interesting because I've often considered the association between color and food. I'm a very picky eater, and a friend of mine has teased that I don't eat bananas solely because they're yellow, and the same can be said about oranges. It's true, I really don't care for either color or fruit, but if food and color are actually connected, which one is the source? Do I not like bananas because they're yellow, or do I not like yellow because I don't like bananas? While I don't think it's that simple, I can definitely see a subconscious manifestation as an underlying reason. Another thing that I thought of when I read this article was that while it's true that we wouldn't necessarily want to eat something that looks faded because we don't see that as appealing but potentially harmful, we are sometimes fearful of artificial coloring as well. I just keep thinking of the movie "The Wedding Planner" where Matthew McConaughey says that he only eats the brown m&ms because they have the least artificial coloring. While this is a silly example, this plays into the idea of survival instinct. Hopefully we're conscious of not only our color preference aesthetically but also what seems natural and is good for us. I think that it then makes sense that color preference has biological roots because of the principle of survival of the fittest, and being able to recognize what foods to eat and what foods to avoid.
ReplyDeleteI think that the argument this article makes about the influence color has on our lives has a lot to do with norms and with what people naturally expect things to look like. In this way, color preferences seem to be learned -- i.e. we learn that strawberries are red, and thus eating a blue strawberry seems weird. Yet you could also look at the situation and see that (like some of you have already said) there is a strong association between color and food, and that humans seem to naturally have an aversion towards eating anything that has a color different from its "natural" one -- in this way, color preference seems to be biologically based. Foods that appear to be most natural and less "tampered with" are associated with being more healthy than foods that have artificial coloring, and eating only natural-looking foods as a way to stay healthy could come from a sort of built-in survival instinct.
ReplyDeleteMoving away from food, I think that we associate certain colors with certain ideas and concepts, and because of those associations, any objects in a certain color will be influenced by those ideas. For example, red is often associated with fire, passion, anger, love, etc. Because of some of these associations (and because their validity has been supported by statistics), car insurance for red cars actually costs more than insurance for any other color car. In this way, I definitely agree with the article -- the associations we make with colors influence the way we perceive anything of that color, and when our color associations do not match reality, we get confused and often do not want to accept such situations.
I think we like certain colors because they remind us of things that we are used too. Therefore it would be learned. For example, I used to hate the color pink but then one of the times we moved the girls room was pink. After having lived in this pink room for six months, I began to love the color pink. Now its my favorite color! This story makes me wholeheartedly believe that color preferences are learned. In some instances, I think there may be a hint of the unconscious present. That correlates with the brown tomato juice, but I think that in general brown tomato juice just does not look appetizing. So would that really be an unconscious choice or a conscious choice?
ReplyDeleteRegarding food choices, i have never really had an experience either way. Hope said she wont eat bananas because they are yellow, and although I cannot stand bananas its not because they are yellow--it is because I think they taster gross. Therefore I think that sometimes we do not like the food first and then that in turn makes us not like the color? (If that makes any sense....)
I think that our color preference is primarily learned. I agree with Kaitlin's point that color preference has a lot to do with exposure and what we associate with a specific color. My favorite color is also the color of my room. One explanation is that I associate my room with feeling safe and at home, so therefore blue is a safe color that makes me feel good. As we get older, we often redecorate our rooms so another reason that a color we like is the color of the walls of the bedroom can simply be because we already liked that color so we picked it to be the color of our room.
ReplyDeleteColor preference also has a lot to do with norms. I think many people associate teenagers whose favorite color is black as being emo. This might influence someone who likes black to say their favorite color is something else so they aren't labeled as emo. In terms of food, I can definitely see how norms play a huge factor. I remember hearing that oranges and lemons are not actually the bright orange and yellow we think they are. I just looked it up and sure enough,if the fruit matures while still green or a dull color, it is usually artificially colored.(http://www.fda.gov/ICECI/ComplianceManuals/CompliancePolicyGuidanceManual/ucm074540.htm) I know when I go to the store to buy oranges or other fruit, I always look for the fruit with the best color. Maybe the ones with the best color have been artificially dyed and I've been fooling myself into believing that they taste better than the duller colored ones.
When I was little, I was obsessed with the color red. I had a red dress that I wore basically every day to kindergarten, because I wouldn't let my mom dress me in any other color. I had red boots that I wouldn't take off. Plus, in my kindergarten class, we would all sit on different color mats and periodically switch mats with other classmates. Once I got the red mat, I refused to let it go. So clearly, I had an obsession with the color red. Now, I do find myself gravitating towards red foods. I'm that person that drowns their fries & burgers with ketchup. I can't help but think that my affinity for ketchup stems from my love of the color red from childhood.
ReplyDeleteThere are definitely some foods that I won't eat because the color freaks me out (I'm also a very picky eater, so this may play a role too.) I won't eating anything orange. I don't know if there's some reason for this stemming from my childhood, but regardless, I won't go near any orange foods. Also, when I'm picking out apples, I will only eat the red ones. I don't think I have ever even tried a green apple before! I always refused to. I think color preference definitely plays a role in my food choices.
i loved the evolutionary perspective on colors. It makes complete sense that we would avoid anything that looks bad to us.
ReplyDeleteBut that can also be culturally based. What is considered a "bad" color to one culture could be a good omen for another. Satan is usually associated with the color red, so for some highly religious and puritanical religions that could be a color of evil instead of the commonly associated valentine's color
I remember one Lizzie Mcquire episode (you can make fun of me late) where the little brother had a mean teacher, so the rest of the class wore green one day to present an attitude of calmness towards her. One that particular day the boy was wearing a red shirt. His classmates gasped as they told him the color red instigates violence. I guess that now makes sense, red is the color of blood and what does bloodshed remind us of? violence.
I think "favorite" colors are socially driven especially as kids. No 5 year old is going to like the black crayon when all her friends are choosing the pinks, purples and reds.
I'm more an indigo girl myself.
Really cool article... as I think about it pertaining to myself, my favorite colors are blue and pink. Maybe I like blue because I like the ocean, I'm always drinking water, I like boys (blue always seems to be associated with boys). Then maybe I like pink because I like being a girl (pink = girly), I idolize Barbie, and I only eat red-pink colored candies. Interesting. In response to the brown tomato juice, I wouldn't go near it. I remember when I was growing up I use to not eat the apples when they turned brown... now I suck it up because i learned they in fact do still taste the same. However, for some foods I'm sure I still use color as a factor to whether or not I will want to eat them. For example, if a banana was brown I'd probably have a really hard time being able to eat it. Between the texture and the new color, I just wouldn't be able to do it. Drinks are the exception to this because they already come in such different colors. Although some good and some bad, the likelihood of people drinking something odd colored is much greater than eating oddly colored food.
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