What does color mean in culture?
Color has evolved in response to the need to select food from the environment that was safe and wholesome to eat. The inheritance of color vision is part of our everyday life and forms a highly significant cultural context. While the physiology of colors is well understood, it provides little explanation for our opinions of color and color combinations, which are dominantly learned and highly associative.
The use of color symbolism varies tremendously from culture to culture (Wegman & Said, 2011). For example, in some cultures, when specifying a color, the texture of the object is more important, and the hue less important. Within Western culture, the enormous increase in interest in highly contrasting hues brought about arts at the turn of this century arose from a combination of psychological and technological developments in society. So, color and culture are inextricably linked (Lamb & Bourriau, 1995).
How Cultural Color Preferences Were Formed
The number of color categories recognised across color spaces strongly vary depending on the community. However, cross-cultural commonalities in categorization indicate that categorization is shaped by determinants that are independent from languages and could also have an ecological origin. They could be related to regularities of color distributions in the environment which might shape color categorization through early experience rather than being a genetically coded. (Witzel & Gegenfurtner, 2018)
Although some writers have claimed that color preferences are universal across cultures, modern empirical research reveals that both similarities and differences exist. The strongest case for a universal preference is for bluish colors. There are exceptions, however, such as blue being ranked among the least preferred colors in Kuwait, and also in Ancient Rome, as evidenced by its relative disuse in historical artifacts. A second contender for universality is the robust dislike of dark yellow (olive), which has been reported for Chinese, British, Japanese, and American observers. Such universal color preferences might may reflect universal features of human ecology rather than innate preferences: e.g., clear sky and clean water are universally blue, whereas biological wastes and rotting food are universally dark yellow (Palmer, Schloss, & Sammartino, 2013).
The ecological explanation, called the “ecological valence theory” (EVT), was formulated by Palmer & Schloss. They proposed that people like/dislike a specific color to the degree that they like/dislike all of the environmental objects that are associated with that color. The ecological rationale is that our color preferences are correlated with objects that are beneficial versus harmful to us. Palmer & Schloss reported strong support for the EVT through empirical measurements of what they call weighted affective valence estimates (WAVEs) for 32 chromatic colors. The WAVE for each color measures the extent to which people like the set of objects that are associated with that color. The prediction is based on the idea that different cultures frequently have different color-object associations and/or different valences for the same objects, both of which can affect color preferences (Palmer, Schloss, & Sammartino, 2013).
Impact of Geolocation on Dominant Cultural Colors
Several factors are thought to be responsible for color preference, including local customs, taboos and demographic factors such as age, gender, education, income, family status, geographical area of residence and ethnicity (Aslam, 2005). It was demonstrated that among nine cultural groups – Americans, Germans, Danes, Australians, Papua New Guineans, South Africans, Japanese-Americans living in the USA, non-Japanese living in Japan, and Japanese – vivid blue was the only color that was commonly preferred highly by all groups, suggesting that cultural variables are indeed involved in color preference.
An example of the geographical and environmental factors on color preference can be seen in the affinity for white in Asian cultures. Several studies found that white was the highest preferred color among the Japanese. White is also the preferred color in Korea, Taiwan, China and Indonesia, confirming the hypothesis that the strong preference for white is based to some degree on geographical and cultural variables, while the reasons for this preference may vary.
In Japan, white was mostly preferred because of its associative image of being clean, pure, harmonious, refreshing, beautiful, clear, gentle, and natural. Another possible explanation of the preference for white in Japan is that literature on ancient Japanese religion and mythology states that ancient people believed in the power of the Sun. As white represented the color of the Sun or sunshine, people accepted it as a sacred color. Another possibility was that their preference derived from the color of their national flag, termed tradition influence. An alternative explanation, language influence, noted that the Chinese character for white is associated not only with pureness but also with everything open, clear, and unselfish. In Indonesia, white was reported as being mostly preferred for its image of being clean, chaste, neutral, and light (Saito, 2015).
Stability of Cultural Color Preferences
There are preferences that have been found to have remained relatively unchanged for many years while other seems to be trend sensitive. The reasons for selecting colors that tended to be liked or disliked regardless of time or place were closely connected with feelings of “pleasantness” and “unpleasantness.” The three principal images most frequently associated with pleasant feelings were “beautiful,” “agreeable,” and “bright,” while those most frequently associated with unpleasant feelings were “dirty,” “disagreeable,” and “dark.” These associations were observed in all regions regardless of the year of the survey. (Saito, 2015)
Many researchers supports the idea that color symbolism influences color preferences, which is consistent with the ecological accounts of color preference, namely that color preferences are determined by people’s preferences for the “things” that are associated with those colors. Solid empirical evidence for the role of color symbolism in color preference is largely lacking, however (Palmer, Schloss, & Sammartino, 2013).
References
Aslam, M. M. (2005). Are you selling the right colour? A cross-cultural review of colour as a marketing cue. International Conference on Corporate and Marketing Communications, (pp. 1-14).
Lamb, T., & Bourriau, J. (1995). Colour: Art and Science. Cambridge University Press.
Nassau, K. (1997). Color for Science, Art and Technology. Elsevier Science.
Palmer, S. E., Schloss, K. B., & Sammartino, J. (2013). Visual Aesthetics and Human Preference. Annual Review of Psychology, 77-107.
Saito, M. (2015). Comparative (Cross-cultural) Color Preference and Its Structure. Encyclopedia of Color Science and Technology.
Wegman, E., & Said, Y. (2011). Color theory and design. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Computational Statistics, 104-117.
Witzel, C., & Gegenfurtner, K. R. (2018). Color Perception: Objects, Constancy, and Categories. Annual Review of Vision Science, 475-499.