Why does every study have to answer a major scientific question? Surely there’s room for the less important questions as well? As I argued in my previous post, the general topic of aesthetic preferences is far from trivial. Answering major scientific questions takes a lot of time and effort, and usually involves many false starts, so it’s a good idea to have some easy side-projects on the go, to keep your publication rate up. Anya Hurlbert’s main research area is the more serious issue of colour constancy, i.e. the tendency for things to look the same colour after a change in the illuminant (e.g. from daylight to light bulbs).

As for the study being “one step up from a survey”, it’s true that the subjects were shown things and asked questions about them, but that’s the most straightforward way to study the perceptual experience. It is a very well-established paradigm to show subjects two stimuli, and get them to say which one looked brighter, longer, faster, further away, etc. Asking subjects which of two colours they prefer is formally equivalent to any of these. I can see no problems with either the subject matter or the methodology of this study.

The authors have been rightly criticised for their rather implausible evolutionary interpretation of the results, but in their paper the evolutionary stuff is clearly described as speculation rather than a firm conclusion.

Aesthetic preferences play an important part in most peoples’ lives. They influence our choice of music, films, books, art, clothes, hairstyle, car, interior decoration, and sexual partner, among many other things. Therefore, to understand aesthetic preferences is to understand an important part of the human psyche. Surely this is not a waste of time and money? Hurlbert & Ling’s study is just a tiny piece in an enormous jigsaw puzzle. It provides some good quality data on what peoples’ colour preferences are.

You ask what purpose this research could serve. One possible application would be to help manufacturers decide what colours to make their products. But the primary goal of science is to find stuff out, not to be useful. Finding stuff out does tend to have practical benefits but, in many fields of science, if you take an individual paper, it is often difficult to think of a convincing practical application of the findings it describes. Most individual findings are pretty insignificant on their own but, taken together, they can lead to a useful increase in our understanding of something.

But, even if something has virtually no practical benefit, it can still be worth funding. That’s why we have government funding of the arts. In the case of science, if the findings are interesting, then the research was worth doing. And given the amount of media coverage of Hurlbert & Ling’s research, it’s clear that many people were interested in it. In fact, research with no immediate practical benefit is just the sort of thing that should be funded by public money – research with obvious practical benefits is likely to find an industrial sponsor.

Whatever gave you the idea that I think that? Why would you imagine that I think men and women are exactly the same? What purpose does it serve you to put words into my mouth?

Yellow for the leader’s jersey in Tour de France. Red polka dots for King of the Mountains jersey. White for the young rider’s jersey. Pink leader’s jersey in the Giro D’Italia. And lots of men’s teams with bright but light colors such as pink, yellow, lime green, sky blue — T-Mobile calls its color magenta but c’mon it’s really bright pink! And this is in a sport which is unabashedly tough and masculine.

At any rate I know the leader’s jerseys in the Tour and Giro are related to the companies that sponsor them (e.g., the pink pages of the Italian newspaper that sponsors the Giro) so maybe it’s just a matter of capitalism at work. On the other hand, the Tour, for one, is over a hundred years old so maybe it’s only a reflection of earlier masculine tastes in color. Then again, dark colors absorb more heat — so maybe it’s just a matter of practicality. At any rate, whatever the explanation, I know you would never see a pink jersey as the ultimate prize in the average US men’s sports competition!

Imagine, for instance that me find blue more eyecatching and women find pink more eye catching.”

Gosh yes, imagine that someone had actually done a study that showed that – rather than an utterly pointless study of expressed colour preferences.

There are serious issues involved if there are sexual differences in colour preferences.

Imagine, for instance that me find blue more eyecatching and women find pink more eye catching.

Imagine that a safety panel decides, based on it’s study of *male* employees, that safety warnings should be written in blue in order to be noticed.

Wouldn’t pointing out that this might put female employees at risk be important enough?

Or is simply pretending that men and women are exactly the same – whatever the consequences – more important to you?

”I suppose that if there is a genetically founded sex bias in our choices of colour of important objects, such as the Houses of Parliament, it would amount to discrimination… hmm, does any country have a pastel legislature?”

I believe there’s a Whitehouse somewhere.

And yet, high IQ heritability enthusiasts interpret that as great evidence for the genetic basis IQ, rather than evidence of the lability of IQ.

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Maybe if the infants are newborn. But if we’re talking about babies who have spent most of the last six months sleeping in a room that is painted the sex-appropriate colour, I would expect them to be *more* affected by the pink/blue preference than adults, for purely environmental reasons.

Interesting fact I found out lately. If you test adopted children in infancy, their IQ scores are strongly correlated with those of their adopted parents and weakly with those of their biological parents. If you test them again later in childhood, this correlation is reversed. In other words, the genetic influence becomes stronger and the environmental influence weaker as the person ages, at least with regard to IQ.