It's in your genes: boys like blue, girls like pink

CBC News

House Member
Sep 26, 2006
2,836
5
38
www.cbc.ca
There is very little we can do about colour preferences: boys like blue, girls like pink. Researchers say these differences may have a basis in evolution in which females developed a preference for reddish colours associated with riper fruit and healthier faces.
Researchers in a study at Newcastle University led by neuroscientist Anya Hurlbert asked a group of men and women to look at about 1,000 pairs of coloured rectangles on a computer screen in a dark room and pick the ones they liked best as quickly as possible.
Afterwards, Hurlbert and colleagues plotted the results along the colour spectrum and found that while men prefer blue, women gravitate towards the pinker end of the blue spectrum.
Hurlbert believes women's preference for pink may have evolved on top of a natural, universal preference for blue.
Hurlbert said for men, thinking about colours was less important because as hunters they just needed to spot something dark and shoot it.
As for Eve, Hurlbert added, maybe there was a different reason she picked that apple.
"Red was the colour of a good ripe fruit," Hurlbert said.
Do you believe your colour preferences are really in your genes?


More...
 

hermanntrude

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Jun 23, 2006
7,267
118
63
47
Newfoundland!
this report doesn't even attempt to prove that the preference is genetic. The study just shows that women, on average, prefer reddish (pinkish) colours and men, on average, prefer blueish colours. Then they go into wild speculation and make it seem like it's part of the study.

I hate this kind of thing.
 

Twila

Nanah Potato
Mar 26, 2003
14,698
73
48
Not to mention pink for girls and blue for boys was a north american thing started in the 50's.

If girls choose reddish hues based on
associated with riper fruit and healthier faces

Then so would men.
 

Niflmir

A modern nomad
Dec 18, 2006
3,460
58
48
Leiden, the Netherlands
Yet more evidence that not all studies are created equal, that surveys are not a dime a dozen, that statistics can't be knocked off in an afternoon and that people need to know more about things like the p value, power, type 1 and 2 errors and the Student t distribution, especially given the beer related history...