Ever wondered why certain colors are more popular than others? Science offers insights into why we develop favorite colors.

In 2003, the lovable character, Buddy the Elf, humorously responded to his father’s business call by asking, "Buddy the Elf, what's your favorite color?" making the moment charming to viewers (though not to Buddy's dad). What better way to spark a conversation than by learning someone's top color? But why are we so curious about someone's favorite color? And what makes us form color preferences?

For a long time, it was challenging to provide a clear scientific explanation for why we have favorite colors. Research has shown that we tend to associate colors with emotions, and it was easy to observe which hues people favored. Yet, due to the lack of color standardization, or a refined set of colors to work with, the exact reasons behind our color preferences remained unclear.

Ecological Valence Theory

Introducing Karen Schloss. As a young girl, she loved organizing her crayons. Today, it makes perfect sense that Schloss is now an assistant professor at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she leads important research on color preferences.

"I have always had strong preferences for certain colors, and these preferences have evolved over time," she explains. "These color preferences shape many of our choices — from what we wear to how we decorate our surroundings, and even the products we purchase."

Curious about how colors influence our daily lives, she sought to understand why. In a series of laboratory studies conducted from 2010 to 2017, she and her collaborator, Stephen Palmer Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, investigated the reasons behind our color preferences.

Schloss and Palmer proposed the Ecological Valence Theory (EVT), which they outline in their 2017 paper. The theory suggests that "...people’s likes and dislikes for a color are tied to their feelings toward the objects and entities associated with that color."

For example, the popularity of blue tones can be attributed to their association with clear skies and pristine water. Conversely, brown shades tend to be less favored as they evoke images of waste or decomposing food — this was the premise behind their hypothesis. Were they correct in their assumption?

Color WAVE

To delve deeper into EVT, Schloss and Palmer conducted a series of lab-based experiments with various groups of participants who ranked color preferences, identified colors that reminded them of specific objects, and determined whether those objects represented positive or negative associations.

The outcome: Weighted Affected Valence Estimates, or WAVE. "We found the correlation was .893," explains Schloss. This indicates that 80 percent of the variance in average color preferences between groups was determined by how much other people liked objects linked to those colors. "That's really cool," Schloss adds. "This is our first proof that these color preference patterns... can be understood through the objects associated with those colors."

With this data, they could investigate various aspects of color preferences, such as personal choices, shifts over time, or even cultural influences. However, WAVE from the original study was merely correlational and did not specifically explain what causes someone to favor a particular color or why preferences might evolve.

Lesions Versus Strawberries: A Color Study

Schloss and Palmer proposed that color preference arises from how we feel about objects associated with that color. "The concept is that if we remind you of certain objects that are either positive and linked to a particular color or negative, we should be able to alter your color preferences, even within a laboratory experiment."

To test their hypothesis, they showed participants images linked to the colors red and green. One group saw positive red objects like strawberries and roses, alongside negative green objects like vomit and mucus. The second group viewed the opposite: negative red images such as lesions and positive green images like forests and kiwis.

Schloss explains that the research revealed how people's preference for colors could significantly shift depending on the positive associations they had with the objects in those colors. For example, if a person saw positive things in red, their preference for the color red would increase more than if they saw the same kind of positive images in green.

Schloss notes that while most people find red associated with negative things, like lesions, repulsive, some participants, especially those interested in pre-med subjects, found them fascinating. This led the team to explore how someone's personal interest could predict how much their color preferences could change after seeing these objects.

According to Schloss, when you bring certain objects to the forefront of someone's mind, it can significantly influence their preference for the colors associated with those objects. This process, which she calls 'activation,' means making someone aware of the object again by bringing it to their attention.

Schloss explains that the objects we think about most will hold more weight in shaping our preferences. For example, if participants saw positive images of strawberries in red rather than lesions, their positive associations with the color red increased as a result.

This phenomenon illustrates why certain colors can evoke positive or negative feelings in people, depending on their prior experiences with objects in those colors over time.

Young girls are often drawn to pink and purple shades because these colors appear frequently in the clothes, toys, and TV shows they enjoy. Conversely, when they encounter yellowish-green hues associated with unpleasant things like vomit, they instinctively avoid them. In fact, yellowish-greenish colors are universally disliked, with vomit being an almost universally repulsive color, as Schloss points out.

An Evolutionary Drive to Be Happy

Researchers like Schloss have examined the theory that color preference might be linked to our evolutionary development. As Schloss explains, color preferences may function as a guiding mechanism, steering us toward positive influences for our health and well-being, while avoiding negative ones.

Humans typically dislike very bitter tastes because, from an evolutionary standpoint, bitterness is often associated with poisonous foods. Schloss suggests that color preferences can be understood in a similar way. However, she points out that not all objects have a clear reason for their color. For modern humans, selecting a color for something like a loveseat helps us thrive by making us happy, while avoiding colors that bring us dissatisfaction, as Schloss discusses in her 2015 paper published in the journal Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics.

Schloss explains, "I can choose any color for my cellphone case... there are arbitrary aspects to it," and she continues, "But the idea is that we have a learning system that helps us form associations between colors and objects or ideas, and we use these associations to guide our decisions about colors. This ability could have been advantageous for us in the past."

While a favorite color may not be a matter of life and death for modern humans, answering a casual question like Buddy's, "What's your favorite color?" might reveal more about our preferences than we previously realized.