“The Color Currency of Nature”, 2009 (; backlinks):
Nature did not grant color vision to human beings and other animals simply to indulge their esthetic sensibilities. The ability to see color can only have evolved because it contributes to biological survival…In the early stages, humans probably continued the natural tradition of using color primarily for its signal function, to indicate maybe status or value. And to some extent this tradition has continued to the present day, as testified, for instance, in the use we make of color in ceremonial dress, traffic signals, political emblems, or the rosettes awarded to horses at a show.
But at the same time the advent of modern technology has brought with it a debasement of the ‘color currency’. Today almost every object that rolls off the factory production line, from motor cars to pencils, is given a distinctive color—and for the most part these colors are meaningless. As I look around the room I’m working in, man-made color shouts back at me from every surface: books, cushions, a rug on the floor, a coffee cup, a box of staples—bright blues, reds, yellows, greens. There is as much color here as in any tropical forest. Yet whilst almost every color in the forest would be meaningful, here in my study almost nothing is. Color anarchy has taken over.
The indiscriminate use of color has no doubt dulled modern humans’ biological response to it. From the first moment that a baby is given a string of multi-colored—but otherwise identical—beads to play with, she is unwittingly being taught to ignore color as a signal. Yet I do not believe that our long involvement with color as a signal in the course of evolution can be quite forgotten.
…All the monkeys that were tested showed strong and consistent preferences. When given a choice between, for instance, red and blue, they tended to spend 3–4× as long with the blue as the red. Overall, the rank order of colors in order of preference was blue, green, yellow, orange, red. When each of the colors was separately paired with a ‘neutral’ white field, red and orange stood out as strongly aversive, blue and green as mildly attractive. Direct observation of the monkeys in the testing situation indicated that they were considerably upset by the red light. When I deliberately added to their stress by playing loud and unpleasant background noise throughout the test, the aversion to red light became even more extreme. Further experiments showed that they were reacting to the red light exactly as if it was inducing fear.
…This aversion to red light is not unique to rhesus monkeys. The same thing has been found with baboons and also, more surprisingly, with pigeons. But what about humans? Experiments on color preference in humans have given results which appear at first sight to be at odds with those in other primates. When people are asked to rank colors according to how much they ‘like’ them, red often comes high if not top of the list, although there is a wide variation between individuals…when Porter tested people from social backgrounds where fashion probably has relatively little influence—African children, on the one hand, the residents of an Oxford old people’s home, on the other—he found that both groups ranked colors in much the same way as did my monkeys, consistently preferring the blue end of the spectrum to the red. [1973, “An investigation into color preferences”, Designer, September: 12–14]
Second, and more important, there is a methodological problem with most of the preference experiments, for the question ‘Which do you like best?’ is really much too simple a question to ask of a human subject: people may say they ‘like’ a color for a host of different reasons depending both on the context in which they imagine the color occurring and on how they construe the term ‘like’.
I shall briefly list some of the particular evidence which demonstrates how, in a variety of contexts, red seems to have a very special importance for humans:
Large fields of red light induce physiological symptoms of emotional arousal—changes in heart rate, skin resistance and the electrical activity of the brain.
- In patients suffering from certain pathological disorders, for instance, cerebellar palsy, these physiological effects become exaggerated—in cerebellar patients red light may cause intolerable distress, exacerbating the disorders of posture and movement, lowering pain thresholds and causing a general disruption of thought and skilled behavior.
When the affective value of colors is measured by a technique, the ‘semantic differential’ [1957, pg76–65], which is far subtler than a simple preference test, people rate red as a ‘heavy’, ‘powerful’, ‘active’, ‘hot’ color.
When the ‘apparent weight’ of colors is measured directly by asking people to find the balance point between two discs of color, red is consistently judged to be the heaviest.
In the evolution of human languages, red is without exception the first color word to enter the vocabulary—in a study of 96 languages, 1969 found 30 in which the only color word (apart from black and white) was red.
In the development of a child’s language, red again usually comes first, and when adults are asked simply to reel off color words as fast as they can, they show a very strong tendency to start with red. [1972, pg23 where ‘red’ has a mean ‘serial position’ of 1.76, which is the lowest, by a subtantial amount.]
- When color vision is impaired by central brain lesions, red vision is most resistant to loss and quickest to recover.
…First, by virtue of the contrast it provides, red stands out peculiarly well against a background of green foliage or blue sky. Second, red happens to be the color most readily available to animals for coloring their bodies because, by pure chance, it is the color of blood. So an animal can create an effective signal simply by bringing to the surface of its body the pigment already flowing through its arteries: witness the cock’s comb, the red bottom of a monkey in heat, the blush of a woman’s cheek.
…My guess is that its potential to disturb lies in this very ambiguity as a signal color. Red toadstools, red ladybirds, red poppies are dangerous to eat, but red tomatoes, red strawberries, red apples are good. The open red mouth of an aggressive monkey is threatening, but the red bottom of a sexually receptive female is appealing. The flushed cheeks of a man or woman may indicate anger, but they may equally indicate pleasure. Thus the color red, of itself, can do no more than alert the viewer, preparing him to receive a potentially important message.
…No wonder that my monkeys, confronted by a bright red screen, became tense and panicky: the screen shouts at them ‘This is important’, but without a framework for interpretation they are unable to assess what the import is. And no wonder that human subjects in the artificial, contextless situation of a psychological laboratory may react in a similar way. A West African tribe, the Ndembu, state the dilemma explicitly, ‘red acts both for good and evil’. It all depends.
…Designers, who are now more than anyone responsible for coloring our world, have a choice before them. They can continue to devalue color by using it in an arbitrary, non-natural way, or they can recognize and build on humans’ biological predisposition to treat color as a signal. [First published in Color for Architecture, ed. Tom Porter and Byron Mikellides, ppg95–98, Studio-Vista, London 1976]
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