I like purple. I’ll pick it before other colors if given a choice. Why? Is it something psycological, I saw something nice that was purple and the good associations stayed with me?
Why does one person pick green and one yellow?
I picked green.
I don’t know why.
My favorite color was green. Why? I can say this much. When I was little, my mind associated green with calm and soothing emotions, with peacefulness and with the outdoors, particularly my own back yard. I would imagine that young brains can and do attach colors to sensations and emotions even before they could cleary articulate those attachments in words.
Also, green was not blue or red, which were my brother’s favorite colors.
Mine’s yellow.
I can’t explain why, but in the past few years I’ve noticed that I don’t just like yellow, but it makes me happy to see it, like some mild optical mood-changing anti-depressant! Isn’t that odd?
(FYI, I’m particularly partial to taxi-cab yellow, so I guess it’s a good thing I live in NYC, right?)
I suspect that this is one of those questions where, if you give a meaningful answer you could then go off and make a fortune in the artificial intelligence market.
I’ve never quite grokked this whole “favorite color” thing. I prefer black clothes, grey cats, blue eyes, red flowers, gold jewelry, silver belt buckles, brown couches, and so on. I don’t have any one favorite color. It all depends on where the color is.
I don’t have a favorite color either. I always used to just pick one when asked. I mean, there are some colors that I think are ugly, but beyond that, I like the look of lots of colors.
Not really. Given a forced-choice task an ANN would need some set criteria from which to choose. You could train it up in the context of a reward system or give it access to past activation states (or just an analysis of current states). Whatever the method the color (a.k.a wavelength) chosen would be that which was most often associated with increased activation that then led to achieving a goal state. AI is pretty broad but this is how I would generally view it. Getting an ANN to pick a favorite is pretty easy. Getting an ANN to experience the qualia of color, on the other hand…
In humans, primacy and recency effects will have a strong role in the decision (and I do view picking a favorite as a decision). Most likely the recency effect, where the color you most recently associated with a positive emotion/experience would be picked. This is also in the context of the very first time you ever consider your favorite color.
To understand primacy and recency, a typical fMRI study could show you a random succession of visual stimuli, flashed in front of you, e.g., 3 flash 5 flash 6 flash 2 flash 4. Your very short term and short term memory will be best for the 3, the 4, and the 6. (I’m not getting into the 6 right now, but it will be the very best for the 4.) These are termed the primacy and recency effects, and it’s found all over the place. Most familiarly perhaps in the ordering of items on public polls. These effects are not limited to short term memories. In fact, they are found in Very Long Term Memory as well. (there are heated debates about these theories of memory, but these results are somewhat apart from them and I use them simply for a framework)
The OP’s question, “Why do we have “favorite” colors?,” should be answerable in a general way. I would say that the first time you consider what your favorite x is, your answer will depend on the most recent variant of x that you experienced and your sum total experience of x in relation to other variants. The reason we have favorite x’s is that there is such a thing as being more pleasantly (…positively…) familiar with a certain variant of a category.
Lastly, a common reason for having a “favorite” color will be not that you actually have one, but that it is socially acceptable to say that you do, and so then you pick.
I don’t have a favorite color, and I don’t remember if I ever really did.
However, there seems to be a Law that says that every child MUST have A (ONE!!) Favorite Color.
I first became aware of this Law when I started Kindergarten or so. Prior to that, my mother pretty much chose clothing colors, room colors, toy colors, etc. for me. I have a sister who is a year younger than me, and we shared a room as well as clothes (nearly the same size), so it was just easier to let Mom choose everything rather than fight over which of us got to choose, especially since I was unaware of the Law of Favorite Colors.
In Kindergarten, though, the Teacher asked me what my Favorite Color was. My mother was not there, and my sister was not there, so I looked around for a moment, and then chose Yellow. It was not my Proudest Moment, but I was stuck with it. From then through high school, when I finally moved out of my parents’ house, my Favorite Color was Yellow. When I finally got my own bedroom, they painted it Yellow. I had Yellow bedcovers, and Yellow drapes, and Yellow walls. (Fortunately, they let me choose a nice Brown carpet to offset the Yellow.)
As soon as I left home, Yellow ceased being my Favorite Color. My mother still insisted on giving me Yellow baubles and clothing, but I was finally free to choose colors that were NOT Yellow, without having to hear “But I thought Yellow was your Favorite Color.”
Now I have children of my own, and because of the Law of Favorite Colors, they fully expect me to have a Favorite Color. My preferred answer of “every color is my Favorite Color” does not satisfy them. So depending on my mood at the time, I might answer “Blue” or “Brown” or “Red” or “Green” (NEVER “Yellow”!), and then they argue with me about the fact that I MUST have the SAME Favorite Color every time they ask. <sigh>
For the record, my daughter’s Favorite Color was Purple, until she became a teenager. Now it is Black. My son’s Favorite Color is Yellow, and he is deadset on anything he owns being Yellow because it is his Favorite Color.
I believe it has something to do with a combination emotional response and visual appeal
Two people can react very diffrerently to the same color
My best friend has a lot of olive in her wadrobe - she loves it and it looks good on her
I can’t stand the color and it makes me look like I have the flu
My favorite colorS are (in pretty much this order) blue, purple, red, fuschia, green - all brights, no pastels. I am a winter (remember getting your colors done?) but I knew that long before that fad ever took hold. Brights, Jewel tones, Primary colors. That’s me. I wear them and I feel good. I try to get home decor items in that spectrum. My costume jewelry fits in that spectrum.
But if I had to pick just one color as a favorite - it would be “rainbow”
While I might agree that people may often pick a color for a reason as simple as recency and it grows from there, hard-coding that into an AI defeats the purpose. The AI would need to come up with its own reason to pick the color, in fact needing to come up with the idea by itself that there could ever be such a thing as a favorite_color property and that it cared enough to fill it, and then after that it would need to be able to get finicky and annoyed if anyone else said anything bad about the color…or alternately not get finicky and annoyed, based on what sort of person it was. But again hardcoding that in and linking it to a finickicity dice-roll is potentially defeating the purpose.
Now one could have the computer add a favorite_color property by suggestion, i.e. when someone enquires to “favorite color” it creates the node. But in real life, in the real world at some point some caveman had to “discover” colors and choose one to like all by himself without ever being asked, the only suggestion ever being made being that of seeing the color in the world. AI’s, as I understand it can’t currently just be an instance of a camera and microphone linked to a computer that develops from nothing to being able to understand language, track objects, and care about abstract things like colors simply as a product of observation and introspection. Learning by suggestion may be a big part of learning, but learning by self-discovery and self-labelling is also a large part of animal (particularly human) intelligence.
If we think just in terms of “dicovering” color, well certainly the computer may be able to notice that certain pixels have different binary values coming in in the bitmap data than others. But could it come to the idea by itself to group ranges of those into a certain heading like “blue” or “yellow”? Could it decide to only create labels for certain ranges–as humans did not originally slice up the entire spectrum of colors (originally just being something like red, black, and yellow or such.) While suggestion may be one way for a label to be created, another way is the desire to communicate discoveries. Originally, most likely, someone noticed something about the black range of colorsand he wanted to communicate it to another person–so he came up with a label and taught that label to others. Others noticed other things in the world and created labels for those, teaching those words back to him. So unless we could get two computers to solely through observing things through their cameras, to be able to notice colors, care enough about a range of them, come up with a label, and be able to teach the other computer that label and what it refers to, then already we’re not able to get anywhere near having an AI choose a favorite.
IANAPsychologist, but here’s my WAG:
Colour plays an important role in the selection of food, perhaps not so much to modern humans, but to our ancestors, associations occurring below the conscious level that, for example, the purple berries are sweet would have been beneficial, but since the criteria regarding what colours relate to ‘good’ and ‘bad’ vary from one region to the next, the ability for the individual to form lasting associations based on experience is what’s required - no use being hard wired to prefer the purple berries if the population expands into an area where there are none, or where the purple berries make you ill.
OK, so we don’t need this ability for survival anymore, but the ability to form associations between colours and concepts of good and bad is still there, just doing a different, perhaps less important job.
Personally, I never had a favourite colour and would just pick any random colour whenever people asked me about it. I like EVERY colour except teal and turquoise, because those are totally bleh and need to be stabbed to death with little plastic fruit-forks, but even they can look good under the right circumstances. And I didn’t like brown until recently, but I like it now because there are just so many different kinds. And also because most things in life are brown whether you like it or not, so you might as well learn to like it.
I never had any stand-out positive experiences with any one colour. But did ANYONE?
Red seems to be a pretty common favourite colour. I read something once about red appearing brighter to humans than other colours, which is why it looks so dark in black and white photos, and this was because the fruit women were supposed to gather was predominantly red, and also why women see colours better than men. I’ll try to find a cite but that would explain people’s preference for one colour.
… however, I didn’t like red until I was about 10. Then again, I also didn’t like music, chocolate, Coca-Cola, movies, WATER, or any of the other colours until I was around that age either, so maybe I was an odd child.
I wish more people realized how **contextual ** color is. What might be considered an attractive color on one object might become really obnoxious on another.
A case in point is my neighbor who painted her house the most saturated bubble-gum pink I’ve ever seen. Of course that little 2x2" paint sample was real purty.
There is a psychological test called the Luscher Color Test, which claims that personality traits and/or emotional state are linked to color preferences:
http://www.colorquiz.com/about.html
Personally, I think it’s a load of rubbish, but the test enjoyed some popularity in the 60’s.