Tags: blue

The Difference Blog

Pink and Blue revisited

Steve Connor (UK Independent) is only one of dozens of reporters this week misreporting the results of Hurlbert and Ling's (2007) study on sex differences in color preferences. The authors state in the abstract that "there is no conclusive evidence for the existence of sex differences in color preference." While they did find that more male college students preferred blues while female college students preferred reds, they also admit that "while these differences may be innate, they may also be modulated by cultural context or individual experience" -- going on to note that Chinese subjects preferred red more than British Caucasian ones.

Many news sources are reporting this study as a genetic difference in color preference. The authors hypothesize about evolutionary reasons they might have gotten these results, such as hunter/gatherer theory and socio-sexual facial color cues. This is not the same as testing the subjects' genes. In fact, they don't mention even testing the subjects (n = 208) for normal color vision, although they apparently gave some of them the Bem Sex Role Inventory -- surprisingly, men who fit cultural sterotypes of masculinity also prefer blue to red.


I can't even begin on this one. Luckily, I already wrote it, in January, when I pointed out that the pink/blue dichotomy has not been consistent historically, and still isn't in Belgium, according to Color Matters. Instead, I'll give you part of the discussion section, which I'm sure you'll enjoy:
girls’ preference for pink may have evolved on top of a natural, universal preference for blue. We speculate that this sex difference arose from sex-specific functional specializations in the evolutionary division of labour. The hunter-gatherer theory proposes that female brains should be specialized for gathering-related tasks .... facilitate the identification of ripe, yellow fruit or edible red leaves embedded in green foliage .... An alternative explanation for the evolution of trichromacy is the need to discriminate subtle changes in skin color due to emotional states and social-sexual signals; again, females may have honed these adaptations for their roles as care-givers and ‘empathizers’.
The Difference Blog

Pink and Blue

Gerianne M. Alexander's 2003 review suggests that there may be evolutionary reasons why girls prefer some toys and boys prefer others. She suggests that there may be innate visual biases that draw children to specific features of the toys, including color:
Compared to boys, girls are also more likely to use a greater number of colors and to prefer warmer colors (i.e., pink and red) to cooler colors (i.e., blue and green). In toy choices and free drawings, then, boys appear to assign greater attention or interest to object movement and location, whereas girls appear to assign greater attention or interest to form and color."
Suggested explanations for this greater female emphasis on color include aid in foraging, spectral qualities of the human face (apparently males tend to have redder faces), or the idea that infant faces are more red-pink than adult faces.

The traditional assumption has been that children's associations of color with sex role is a socialization artifact. Picariello et al's (1990) experiments seem to show that children as young as 3 identify colors with sex roles. Children were asked to identify the sex of toy pigs who differed only in color, and their choices were consistent with adult sex-color stereotypes.


So the hypothesis, as far as I can tell, is not that boys like blue, but that girls really like pink. I find Alexander's (2002) study of toy preferences among vervet monkeys interesting, but I question the interpretation of results. I'm fairly certain that a vervet monkey doesn't know what a cooking pot is for. Therefore, the result that more female vervets initiated contact with the pot than with the ball seems like an over extension to me. If there were other features of the pot to explain this (color or decoration) these were not explained in the article.

[edit]: According to Color Matters, pink was traditionally for boys and blue for girls through the 1920's, and in Belgium, this is still the case.