Why Blue Is the World's Favorite Color - The Evolutionary Psychology of Color Preference

The Overwhelming Popularity of Blue

"What is your favorite color?" Ask this question around the world and you get a remarkably consistent answer: blue, by a wide margin. From Europe and North America to Asia, when people in countries with different languages and different daily habits are asked which color they like best, blue repeatedly comes out at the top. Countries with vastly different cultural backgrounds keep choosing blue.

This universality is striking. Food preferences, musical tastes, and standards of beauty vary enormously across cultures. Yet when it comes to color preference, blue's dominance is stable across cultural boundaries. This suggests that the preference for blue is not culturally learned but may be rooted in human biology.

An Evolutionary Explanation - The Color of Sky and Water

The Ecological Valence Theory, proposed in 2010 by Professor Stephen Palmer and Professor Karen Schloss at the University of California, Berkeley, is one framework for explaining color preference in evolutionary terms.

According to this theory, humans prefer colors associated with objects that are beneficial for survival and dislike colors associated with harmful objects. What is blue associated with? Clear skies and clean water. A blue sky signals fair weather and favorable conditions for activity. Clear blue water indicates a clean, drinkable water source. For our ancestors, blue sky and blue water were signals of resources directly linked to survival.

Conversely, brown and yellow-green tend to be less popular because they are associated with decayed food and contaminated water. In experiments by Palmer and his colleagues, preference scores for each color corresponded with the "pleasantness" ratings of the objects that color evoked.

Blue Is One of Nature's Rarest Colors

Another intriguing fact to consider is that blue is one of the rarest colors in nature. Blue flowers are limited even when garden cultivars are included, and blue animals are scarcer still. The wings of morpho butterflies and the feathers of kingfishers appear blue, but this is not due to pigment. It is structural coloration caused by light interference in microscopic structures. Among vertebrates, only a very few examples of a true blue pigment are known.

This rarity may enhance blue's appeal. The scarcity bias, the tendency to perceive rare things as more valuable, may apply to color perception as well. Because encounters with blue in nature are limited, a blue sky or a blue ocean makes a particularly strong impression.

The Psychological Effects of Blue

Research in color psychology suggests that blue has distinctive effects on human psychology and behavior.

First, blue is associated with a sense of calm. Where red works in the direction of stirring feelings up, blue is often felt to loosen tension. The fact that blues and greens are readily chosen for the interiors of medical facilities and public buildings is probably not unrelated to this calm impression.

Second, blue is associated with trust. The prevalence of blue in corporate logos, such as Facebook, IBM, Samsung, and Ford, is no coincidence. The more an industry wants to convey that it can be safely entrusted with something, as with finance and telecommunications, the more readily blue is chosen.

Third, there are research findings that blue promotes creativity. In an experiment published in 2009, participants working against a blue background scored higher on creative tasks than those working against a red background. In the same experiment, a red background suited tasks that called for pinning down details. The explanation offered is that blue draws out a motivation to move toward things, while red draws out a motivation to avoid them.

Languages That Had No Word for Blue

There is a fascinating linguistic fact: many ancient languages had no independent word for "blue." In Homer's epics, the sea is described as "wine-colored." In ancient Chinese and Japanese as well, blue and green were long represented by the same word. (The Japanese term "ao-shingo" for a traffic light that is actually green is a remnant of this.)

In linguistics, it has long been pointed out that color terms differentiate in a roughly fixed order as cultures develop: first light and dark (white and black), then red, then yellow and green, and finally blue. This order is also introduced in linguist Guy Deutscher's writing for general readers. Blue differentiates last because blue objects are rare in nature, and there was little everyday need to distinguish and name "blue" as a separate category.

Summary

Behind blue being the world's favorite color, several things appear to overlap: an evolutionary link to clear skies and clean water as survival resources, its rarity in nature, and psychological impressions tied to calm, trust, and creativity. Humans may prefer blue because, for hundreds of thousands of years, "a blue sky over blue water" was the safest and most abundant environment of all.