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Here’s a quick question with no right or wrong answer: what’s your favourite colour? Take a moment and think about it.
Whether you picked blue, pink, yellow, red or any other point on the visible spectrum, the answer is usually just a fun bit of trivia. It’s the sort of casual icebreaker you might ask on a first date, or part of a silly Buzzfeed quiz from back in the day. But does our favourite colour say more about us than we realise? Could there be a link between personality and colours?
To help us answer some colourful questions about the potential links between hues and humans, we chatted with Dr. Jay Zenkic, Deakin University’s Marketing Discipline Group senior lecturer.
If you played along earlier and picked a favourite colour, you might be wondering: why is that my favourite colour? According to Dr. Zenkic, there’s no single reason why people have a favourite colour, but there are some factors that could influence how we feel.
‘For example, culture is a big determinant of favourite colours such that the most popular colour in many western countries such as Australia is blue, while Chinese people often like the colour red much more, because it is associated with good fortune,’ Zenkic says. ‘Men also tend to like green-blue much more than women do, and older people tend to like darker colours than younger people.’
One study suggests that colour preferences are influenced by how it appears in the world around us – like sports teams, university mascots and the environment. It’s fair to say that when it comes to picking our favourite colours, we can’t always be sure why we like what we do. ‘There’s a lot going on with colour preferences and we try not to generalise too much!’ says Zenkic.
Pop culture often draws some general links between colour and personality – usually to tell us a bit about a character. Just look at Reese Witherspoon’s pink outfits in Legally Blonde, suggesting she’s girly or ‘ditzy’ before she proves otherwise, for example. Colour us intrigued, but is there a broader link between personality and colour in the real world?
‘There are quite a lot of links between personality and favourite colours,’ says Zenkic. ‘For example, red is associated with extraversion and being outgoing, while yellow is associated with agreeableness or being sympathetic and friendly. Green is also associated with being conscientious and emotionally even keeled.’
Some studies have also found a link between colour saturation – the intensity of colour – and personality or emotion. Another found that not only do hostile personality traits prefer red, they might be more likely to notice it in the first place. Talk about seeing red!
Despite these associations, Zenkic says it’s important to remember that it’s not an exact science. ‘We can’t, for example, say that people who like green are always conscientious, because this can and does vary. We also can’t say that people like green because they are conscientious because there might be something else going on in the brain that drives both of these things. So, at the end of day, people shouldn’t read too much into their favourite colour.’
Whether you like dark colours or bright colours or anything in between, favourite colours seem to be as much about personal preference as personality. Even the tests that link colour and personality (like our cheeky Buzzfeed example) tend to paint with broad strokes, according to Zenkic.
‘To my knowledge, there are no good personality colour tests,’ he says. ‘If you Google this, you’ll definitely find lots of tests, but these are generally “pop science“ and should only be done for fun. If you’re curious, go for it, just remember to take the results with a huge grain of salt.’
Personality tests can be helpful in some cases, though – like for career choices or study help. If you’re interested in exploring the potential link between your personality and favourite colour, Zenkic recommends checking out the OCEAN (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism) model personality test. Using OCEAN as a starting point, you might be able to draw some links between your personality type and studies on personality and colour.
‘[OCEAN] can give you a basic idea of what your general personality is like (how you might often behave) and you can then compare and contrast your results against what has been found in research on colour,’ says Zenkic. ‘One such article is Exploring the relationships between personality and colour preferences by Jue and Ha.’
Feeling blue, green with envy, tickled pink – we often use colourful language to describe moods. But is there a psychology behind the way colours and moods seem to connect? Dr. Zenkic says that there is.
‘In one study, researchers induced participants to feel different moods and asked them to select a colour that best represented this feeling,’ he says. ‘They found that yellow was associated with joy and yellow-green with relaxation. While people often think of blue as also being tied to relaxation and even sadness, they found no such association with their participants.’
So why do colours make us feel a certain way? Zenkic says that it’s all about the world around us. ‘For example, red is associated with good fortune in China and many people might have fond memories of red packets for New Year celebrations. Yellow, on the other hand, is likely associated with joy because this is the colour of the sun and summer.’
Marketers know this well. The next time you go shopping or eat out, keep an eye out for how spaces use colour to influence mood and feeling.
‘Another study looked at how patrons evaluated a restaurant that had yellow walls that were later painted violet,’ says Zenkic. ‘People liked the violet better, despite there also being research to suggest that we associate yellow with appetite.’
The short answer? It doesn’t. Your favourite colour might reflect your personality or emotions, and certain personality types might even seem to prefer a particular colour. In general, though, your favourite colour isn’t a big factor that impacts your personality.
‘Researchers are always very wary about predicting what any one person is like,’ says Zenkic. ‘The tools we use to study how colours relate to personality rely on comparing what most people feel, think, and do. So, trying to predict what any one individual is like is often going to lead to wrong guesses. In short, what colours you specifically like is not a good predictor of what you are like as a person.’
