Science Explains Why We Have Favorite Colors

Why do we have favorite colors at all? Historically, it has been difficult to empirically explain why we like certain colors, and it is still difficult to explain why people like some colors more than others. Here are some theories that may help us understand why we have favorites.

Ecological Valence Theory

Karen Schloss

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.

• This explains why a person may have positive or negative feelings about certain colors – it comes down to your experience with objects of those colors over time

An Evolutionary Drive to Be Happy

Scientists have explored the idea that color preference may be part of our evolutionary design

• Objects don’t always have a rhyme or reason for their color
• We have this learning mechanism to learn associations between colors and objects or concepts, and then use those to inform our judgments about colors

The Ecological Valence Theory (EVT)

People like/dislike a given color to the degree that they like /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, brown hues remind us of feces or rotting food

Color WAVE

Schloss and Palmer hypothesized that color preference is caused by how someone feels about objects of that color

• They hypothesized that if we bring to mind for you particular objects that are, say positive and associated with a particular color or negative, we should be able to change your color preferences over the course of even a laboratory experiment
• 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 mucous
• The second group saw the opposite: negative red images such as lesions and positive green images
• People significantly increased their preferences for the colors associated with positive things they saw

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