Estrogen creates rose-colored glasses?
A couple of points today about the generation, use, and misuse of statistics. The first link from Nezua—MTV and the AP joined forces to poll a bunch of young people ages 13 to 24 about happiness, a term that should set off a few alarms because of the distressingly vague and fleeting nature of that thing we call happiness. They found a big gap between white kids and black and Hispanic kids in reported levels of happiness.
Also, research showed that non-Hispanic whites are happier than blacks and Hispanics. While 72% of whites say they are content, just 56% of blacks and 51% of Hispanics did.
With a 20+ point gap there, it’s pretty hard to deny that something is going on, though what is hard to say. One problem with the concept of happiness is that the pressure to claim you’re happy is often a bigger factor in whether or not you’ll claim you’re happy than how you actually feel. That said, the most likely explanation that comes to mind for the gap is that it dovetails with the way that white and non-white kids don’t have the same average wealth or personal opportunities for education, etc. It’s easy to be dismissive of the importance of money to happiness, but money buys security and opportunities, and those things are in fact pretty critical to happiness.
They found another fact you can be sure will be trotted out by anti-choicers from now until the end of time.
Sexually active young adults, as a rule, indicated “lower levels of happiness,” the research partners said.
How much and what the other factors were aren’t mentioned, but it does well to remember correlation doesn’t mean causation. Since the span was ages 13-24, I’m suspicious on this issue. A sexually active 13-year-old and a sexually active 24-year-old are much different beasts, and grouping them together on this issue is simply misleading.
This bit of silliness that has a mainstream media-ready hook has been all over the feminist blogs.
As a professor of visual neuroscience at Newcastle University in England, Hurlbert was able to create a scientifically sound study to determine whether girls really do prefer pink. The answer, as outlined in a report in the Aug. 21 issue of the journal Current Biology,, is “yes.” Females do have a preference for pinkish colors that males don’t.
“We find very clear differences between the males and females we have tested,” Hurlbert said. “We haven’t yet found any exceptions.”
In more formal terms, females in the study showed a preference for the reddish side of the red-green axis of colors, while males didn’t. There was no gender difference in preferences on the blue-yellow axis, with everyone tipping toward blue. The study included 208 participants, ranging in age from 20 to 26.
Of course, the word “baby” is dropped a lot to imply that there was some sort of great biological truth unfettered by the intense amounts of you-love-pink training women get—but as you can see, they picked an age group that’s just coming out on the other side of the most pink-intensive formative years of a female life. Kyso has made mincemeat out of the problems with this blatantly media-friendly study already, so I recommend reading her.
I do have one response to this point by Sara.
I’ve never been bothered by the pink-is-for-girls, blue-is-for-boys thing. It’s utterly arbitrary. The way it’s used to enforce gender roles is irksome, but a world where the colors had the same gendered associations but people weren’t expected to necessarily lead such gendered lives - that would be fine by me. If that association were somehow tied to biology? Fine, whatever. So when I see a Feministing post disparaging a study that purports* to show an innate preference for pink in women, my first thought is, “Who cares?”
I think the logic goes something like this: Armchair evolutionary psychologists are always trying to argue that women were born to wear aprons and abhor shoes and book-learning. Which we all know is silly. But if they can establish in people’s minds the idea that women are born preferring pink, then it’s easy to start convincing people that other, less arbitrary and more oppressive markers of femininity are also innate.
69 Responses to “Pink happiness parade”
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My favorite color is purple — does that make me androgynous?
My favorite color is purple — does that make me androgynous?
Mine is red for decorative and kitchenware purposes, blue, green and silver for clothing and anything bold for shoes. I’m not sure what that makes me.
Hell, just from reading the snippet you’ve included, I can tear the study to shreds. It’s like Hurlbert has never heard of socialization.
I like Orange, myself, for whatever it’s worth (and pull it off quite nicely, I must say).
I do like pink, but I can’t wear it. Pastels turn me fish-belly white.
Mnemosyne,
I think it’s supposed to make you an African-American lesbian abuse survivor.
Y’know, the British represented their Empire on maps in the color pink because it was considered a masculine color in the 18th/19th century. It’s really only in the last century that pink became associated with girls the way it has. I wonder how that fits in with this “scientific” proof?
Oh yeah, I forgot social sciences are “soft” so we needn’t be bothered with cultural explanations.
“towards the red end of red-green” does NOT necessarily mean pink. ::headdeesks:: I love rich true red and blue-red hues. I love emerald and aqua. I hate pastels. Whiten the colors even more so they become “ices” and I might like them. If I pick royal red as the best out of options they gave me, it would be insane to infer from liking scarlet that I like pink.
Exaactly. In fact, pink was considered a much more robust, higher-energy, active color, so it was given to boy babies. While blue was seen as a calmer, more passive color, so it was given to girls.
Kinda throws that whole 20th-century color-sexing on it’s ass.
Hmm, mine is red in the bathroom, but blue and blue/green in the kitchen.
And yeah, brighter and bolder shoes are just more fun. I have one pair of royal blue and yellow pumas. One of my students a few years ago would always yell, “Yay, it’s the happy shoes” when I wore them to class.
“Studies” like this drive me nuts - the experiment and conclusions have absolutely nothing to do with other. This seems to be particularly prevalent in evolutionary biology.
Here’s the what the study actually showed: Young adult females like pinker shades of blue than young adult males do. Nothing in this study says anything about babies, and no conclusions can be drawn about innate traits or evolution.
I could just as easily do a study showing that men “innately” prefer pants to dresses more than women do and spin out some off-the-wall speculation about how we have evolved this way. Come to think of it someone is probably doing that study right now. And it will probably get published in a reputable journal too.
*thump* *thump* *thump*
[bangs head on desk repeatedly]
I’m looking forward to the field of psychology realizing how weak a lot of the evolutionary psych work is…
I don’t mean to delurk for an OT comment, but it’s… ironic that this page gets an ad for bullz-eye.com “The guy’s portal to the web” which has a picture of a girl in nothing but a g-string looking coyly over her shoulder. I apologize if this has already been addressed.
Yeah, well my snarky comment goes something like: The owner of a certain F-something named blog oversimplifying an issue and then dismissing it as unimportant? Say it ain’t so.
Seriously, if you are going to stay in the shallow end of the swimming pool why even bother to blog?
so when are you going to review Stumbling on Happiness by daniel Gilbert?
i find it funny, then, that i’ve had several male students, both 4th graders and 8th graders, who love pink. someone better study them. funnily enough, the seemed to prefer light pink, whereas i like the more neon shades.
My favorite color is purple — does that make me androgynous?
You could always be Caesar…
What about all the cultures without a blue/pink gender gap? Are they abnormal or is this preference not universal and hence without any evolutionary basis?
Oh my!
Early human societies almost certainly engaged in a division of labour between the sexes, with men developing a preference for the blue skies that signalled good weather for hunting, while women foraged locally for fruit and berries.
“This division of labour may be at the root of why girls now prefer pink. Evolution may have driven females to prefer reddish colours — reddish fruits, healthy, reddish faces. Culture may exploit and compound this natural female preference,” Professor Hulbert was quoted as saying.
How remarkably silly! If most of human evolution occurred in Africa, then given the sun there, faces were likely very dark, where do “reddish faces” come from then?
I do wish someone would hire a someone with at last one or two basis statistics classes under their belts to help design these studies. Was the sample population random? (Remember the legendary telephone poll when only rich people had phones?) How big was the sample size? Did anyone ask questions to see whether people were saying what they thought the interviewer wanted to hear? How many variables were measured - and were the results tested to see whether an important variable or variables were left out? Etc., etc. and so forth…
Don’t the teen gangs in Japan wear pink jackets? Or one of them at least? I remember reading that some time ago (it could have been total bunk, it WAS on the internet) and snickering.
http://www.japaninc.com/article.php?articleID=392
Here’s my thing: if women are geared to prefer to wear pink, and men are geared to prefer women wearing pink, doesn’t that mean that men prefer pink?
Incidentally, preppy men wear pink. Because they can, and because they look good in it. But they tend to come from social classes where they don’t need to try very hard to show that they have power. Methinks this masculine anxiety about pink is in part class-based.
I don’t think that finding biological distinctions between men and women is a bad thing. I think it’s neutral, actually. I don’t think they found much of anything with this study, and maybe I didn’t make that clear. I’m not saying we ought to just swallow the silly speculation that came along with this study. They proved exactly nothing about human evolution.
We know about lots of physical differences between men and women, and it’s been a hard but useful task for feminists to demonstrate that they don’t have an effect on anyone’s value as human being. We don’t need to disassociate colors and genders. We need to disassociate erroneous meanings from the facts of the world around us. Science is descriptive, and not prescriptive, and getting that lesson out there is a lot more useful than crafting propaganda for people who believe that nature has any intent for us.
Sara,
There’s a difference between saying “women as a group tend to…” and “women are….” One of the things that gender studies has forced is the recognition of the differenc between those two statements, and thus to avoid problems of universalization. One of the problems with a lot of scientific studies–it’s definitely a problem in the reporting about such studies–is that they’re often framed in this universalist tone. That’s the sense I get from your approach to “sex differences.” Hell, the lines between the sexes are far less clear than we’d like to imagine them to be. How can absolute difference exist when absolute boundaries don’t?
That, for me, is one of the biggest problems that has to be overcome: universlizing and essentializing of absolute differences between the sexes.
MAJeff, I don’t disagree with you. Enforcing what you might call “gender compliance” really is a recipe for misery. I don’t blame enforcement of gender roles on recognition of gender, though.
I guess this is a little tangential, but I’ve always been bothered by the pressure to frame every human experience in terms of gender. Most of the things I do have fuck-all to do with my chromosomal makeup, reproductive organs, or gender identity. So what’s up with the gender must-haves? Why would the “you must have babies and wear pink and knit crowd” insist is it so important to maximize my womanliness, and not simply my humanity?
glassonion:
Please don’t confuse “evolutionary biology” with “evolutionary psychology.” These are two completely different things.
Sara:
The point isn’t that finding biological distinctions between men and women is a bad thing, it’s that these “studies” and the gendered color preferences they purport to explain have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with biology.
Look, let’s all at least be thankful that this study was done on actual women… because usually when headlines trumpet that “Women are innately this” or “Women have evolved for that” it’s about a study that was done on rodents.
Dan, I realize that’s a problem. What I’m interested in is the difference between the reactions, “That can’t be true,” and “that hasn’t been proven,” and then the philosophical question of what it might mean if it were true or not. (I think they’re connected!) We can pick the nits of these studies all we want, but we’re going to be doing it into eternity if we can’t convince people that ovaries or testicles do not determine what a person should do with their life.
What does it say about me that not only do I dislike pink and love blue, but that I initially misread reddish faces as reddish feces (and couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out why evolution may have driven us to show a preference for GI bleeds).
On the happy study: Wasn’t there a (relatively) recent study that said white men had the highest rate of suicide amongst various demographics?
On the bogus pink/blue study: a previous poster is right in that only until quite recently (WWI I believe), pink was the color for boys and blue for girls with appropriate power associations. And it should be stressed that all of the subjects were adults, thus, conditioning cannot be excluded–at all–or else, according to the Harvard Implicit Association Test, bigotry would be deemed “natural” rather than learned.
Worse, this entire test is designed to prove the “division of labor” theory, in which men are designed to have all the power and women are designed to be submissive to their authority. This reminds me of how society views cooking: women are expected to do the cooking at home as a servant, but it is men who are expected to *totally* dominate when it comes to being top chefs, positions of power. Or how it is women who are most obsessed with fashion, yet the fashion designers are overwhelmingly (gay) men; hell, the whole industry is run by men.
I should have added that the division of labor theory should just be called division of *power,* which largely depends on authoritarianism (Might is right!) to validate the idea that males are predisposed to be all-powerful.
The actual study showed that there’s a bigger gender gap in colour preference between British men and women than between Chinese men and women. British women and Chinese of both genders preferred the redder end of the rainbow, but British men didn’t. So, the real abnormality here is that British men are socialised to abhor red nuances.
(I’m not linking to the critical analysis where I found this out, because it’s in Swedish.)
Sara:
And just why do you think people believe things like that? Nobody springs fully-formed from the head of Zeus believing that we are nothing more than our genitals. That’s the conclusion of their argument, not the premise. They reach that conclusion because they read studies like this one and don’t understand just how poorly formulated they are. So if we want to convince people that ovaries or testicles do not determine what a person should do with their life, we are absolutely required to attack the logical malformations behind the evidence people use to argue that they do.
Telling people they’re wrong is completely ineffective if you’re unable (or unwilling) to demonstrate why they’re wrong. Because if you can’t (or won’t) do that, you’re not making arguments, you’re just asserting points of dogma.
Dan, you’re right. But when it comes to how we’re going to think about men and women in moral terms, we aren’t going to be making much progress by deciding whether or not women like pink. It doesn’t matter, ethically.
So, I don’t think that this study shows an innate female preference for pink. I also don’t think it says anything about the moral worth of women.
I’m looking forward to the field of psychology realizing how weak a lot of the evolutionary psych work is…
I’d be curious to hear more about the position of evolutionary psychology within psychology departments. Are there a lot of psychologists who think that the evo-psych folks are just screwing around and not doing anything that genuinely advances the science? It seems like the kind of place where academic turf battles would develop.
I’ve heard a lot of evolutionary biologists (from Pharyngula to Gould to Texas’ own Mark Kirkpatrick and Sahotra Sarkar) caution against the excesses of evolutionary psychology, so it’s not like the field of biology is being swept away in the hysteria.
Sara, this isn’t some abstract philosophical discussion where you can just say whatever the crap you want without backing it up and everyone just sits around nodding and stroking their chins contemplatively.
We can’t decide how we’re going to think about men and women without specifically rebutting these flawed “studies” that purport to tell us what to think about men and women. Because don’t kid yourself, that’s exactly what this study and others like it are meant to do. And clearly, that matters to someone, or nobody would bother with them in the first place.
So no, you don’t get to assert that this study doesn’t show an innate female preference for pink, then turn around and declare that explaining why this study doesn’t show an innate female preference for pink is just “picking nits” and “doesn’t matter.” It doesn’t work that way.
the ’sexually active folks are less happy study’ is really silly. i think the easiest thing you could gather from that is that a lot of people having sex are having sex with their romantic partners. when you have a romantic parter, you’re gonna have drama, with or without sex. drama doesn’t make *me* happy, in any case. :
i mean, obviously i can’t prove that, but i find it far more likely than ’sex makes people sad.’ i mean, can they choose a fucking position? first sex causes oxytocin secretion which is supposed to make you SOVERYHAPPY (which is why if you ‘use it up’ by having casual sex, you’ll NEVER BE HAPPY WITH YOUR HUSBAND. or something.), and now, sex makes you depressed. WTF?
Serves them right.
I don’t understand why these studies come out ‘proving’ men are one way and women are another. It’s like all those scientists who tried to prove one race was more intelligent than another - if we can see that for the prejudiced bullshit it is, why is society still happily swallowing similar nonsense about gender?
And my favourite colour’s green. What does that make me, some kind of third-gender super-reverse-woman?
speaking of colors, i had the thoughts along the lines of RepubAnon above, the thoughts i always do when “quizzes” and “surveys” are done. thoughts of sample size and funding behind and method of sampling, and area of sampling, etc.
for example…in the first survey you link, the one i wrote on, what color/appearance were the people questioning the kids? how were they dressed? how old did they appear? these things could easily affect the outcome, what the kids told them, etc.
i love pink. tho i prefer when it gets a tinge of peach to it. a salmon more than a bluish-pink. this means i swing.
with salmon.
I hate pink. Friend of mine developed a passion for pink in the upper classes — just seeing him walking down a corridor with a pink tie and a neon-pink backpack was enough to trigger a migraine attack.
Dark reds, emerald green, black, white and silver for me.
Also, happy = content? The time when I was desperately unhappy was the one I was least discontent, lacking nothing but happiness, basically.
Studies like these are on crack.
Okay, let me see if I understand all of this…
1. If my 12 year old kid next year says that she’s happy, it’s either because she is white or because she feels pressure to say that.
2. I’m supposed to like pink dresses and my husband blue pants- even though the opposite is true (he looks cute in fushia and cotton candy washes him out). That one daughter prefers deep red and the other bright yellow will be addressed elsewhere.
3. The more casual sex I have wih said husband, the more miserable I will be. (gonna take awhile to wrap my head around THAT one) HUH.
Gonna need more coffee today, I see.
I also commented about the pink study and thought it was silly with a caveat–given the information in the summary (really press release). If you do a search on Hurlbert, you’ll see that she is in Visual Neuroscience in the Psychology, Brain and Behaviour group in the School of Biology (she’s doing real science) and looks at color perception in general (and its underlying neural mechanisms). It could easily be that the actual paper gives many more details that make it a stronger study (or gives the cautions) and that the actual paper has many more conclusions but that this is what was highlighted. The full paper is not free online and my university doesn’t subscribe to it so I can’t see the actual paper.
Also, there are sex differences in how we perceive color (men, for example, are much more likely to be color blind–the red and green receptor cells are on the x chromosome and since men only have one they are more likely to miss them).
The study about happiness also seems a bit silly (the early sex and happiness thing could go either way for example–perhaps teens who are unhappy are more likely to have sex?).
My favorite color is yellow. I wonder what that means…
ZOMG, so is the sun!! And since I’m a woman I can have sons! It much just show my biological preference to having male children since they soooo strong!!!
Now to tackle this mess:
[So when I see a Feministing post disparaging a study that purports* to show an innate preference for pink in women, my first thought is, “Who cares?”]
Okay, that works on an individual basis and frankly, I agree in that context. HOWEVER:
“Studies” like this, published and shoved out for the masses, help reinforce stereotypes that are outdated. Too many people are willing to read and believe any pulp study, without caring about how TRUE it is or how biased a slant or how twisted the data is to draw the conclusions. Others are more than willing to use these same “studies” to further their own agendas, quoting them as fact on the airwaves or in their own publications, in an attempt to sway their “pathetic sheep mentality” audiences to believe that anyone who doesn’t fit these ideals is somehow odd, different, evil, morally corrupt, etc.
Then once that particular seed is planted into their wee brains, it grows and becomes divisive. How dare “they” be so different than “us”? We’re “right”; they are “wrong”. It goes downhill fast from there.
Amanda’s response to this was far more concise and clear; she’s used to debate and writing about complex ideas like this more than I am. So apologies up front if I am not making a helluva lot of sense. My perspective comes from decades of trying to fit my round life and happy marriage into a square box; wasting years to discovering that these so-called standards are really nothing more than propaganda and bullshit.
Sexually active young adults, as a rule, indicated “lower levels of happiness,” the research partners said.
Since the span was ages 13-24, I’m suspicious on this issue.
13? By what stretch of the imagination would they describe 13 as a “young adult”, socially, physically, or psychologically?
So, it turns out that at my university, I actually do have access to the actual paper. And although the hunter/gatherer theme is brought up, the conclusion also states:
“Yet while these differences may be innate, they may also be modulated by cultural context or individual experience.” This is further amplified when she noted that the Chinese subjects preferred red more than the British subjects, and that red is the color of good luck in China.
Among the stupid parts: even if you accept the stupid stereotype that men are out hunting, blue sky is pretty much the last effing thing a subsistence hunter wants to look at. Wrong time of day, wrong weather, wrong target. Now if men developed a preference for the color of herbivore feces…
Arun: “How remarkably silly! If most of human evolution occurred in Africa, then given the sun there, faces were likely very dark, where do “reddish faces” come from then? ”
While very dark faces do not show “red” the way fairer ones do, a very dark person who is not healthy does indeed appear paler or less “red” than a very dark healthy person, especially as infants. In addition, the color of the inside of the mouth (including gums and tongue) are redder in healthy people than in unhealthy people.
So there is a possibility, anyway, of a logical connection between “reddish” skin color (meaning health, e.g., not anemic), especially in babies, and the supposed preference for the red side of the spectrum by women.
It’s still a perfect waste of time, though.
Paul, maybe that explains the preference of corporations for men who wear black, brown, or navy blue. Or maybe dark green, if they’re feeling really daring.
With the way the picture has the woman kissing the package I read ‘care kit’ first and wondered what the clamps had to do with anything. That out of the way, my autistic child freaks out about pink and I have always preferred jewel tones and greens, so pink is kinda out of the picture in our household.
Sara, calling complaining about this study “picking nits” is dismissive of the defense of science. First, the problems with this study aren’t little nits. They’re big gaping holes of huge assumptions that are, frankly, an embarrassment to science. The hypothesis had nothing to do with the sample group chosen, the results had little to do with the bulk of the conclusion, it was shoddy science. That’s not picking nits, it’s pointing out that main stream media is ready to report shoddy science as fact.
And if pointing out the flaws in one study might make someone or some media outlet think a little more critically about the next study, then that’s not a waste of time. More and more the right wing is co-opting science. They’re finding one fringe scientist who’s passionate about something, and backing him to the hilt, and calling it proof of whatever he believes in. They’re funding non-peer reviewed journals and calling it a scientific community. They’re acting like things that have been well established by a rigorous and critical scientific community are just tentative theories, and acting like something sort of suggested by one flawed experiment is, well, the word of God.
And people believe them. The right wing is hurting science itself - turning it to their own ends. Defense against that isn’t petty - it’s a defense of truth.
Sorry, I’ll climb off my soapbox now. But the mixture of politics and science is screwed up, and it’s everyone’s responsibility to try and fix it.
Neil: I’d be curious to hear more about the position of evolutionary psychology within psychology departments. Are there a lot of psychologists who think that the evo-psych folks are just screwing around and not doing anything that genuinely advances the science? It seems like the kind of place where academic turf battles would develop.
It’s not had much traction where I can see. But then again, my focus is on Educational Psychology and Performance Improvement so “innate differences” are considerably less important than trying to reduce the gap between novice and expert performance in a field. Our goal is to develop ways to get everyone from “helpless without a clue” to “reasonably competent,” and hopefully scratch many of Maslow’s motivational itches towards self-actualization in the process.
The one quibble that I have to point out is that there is evolutionary psychology, and there is Evolutionary Psychology. Just about all forms of psychology are to some degree “evolutionary psychology.” Radical behaviorism proposed an evolved mechanism shared among most animals that associates behaviors with pain or pleasure. B. F. Skinner was quite clear that he saw this capacity for learning that animals evolved as an adaptive feature. Cognitive psychologists came along and said, “hey wait a minute, pure association does not explain all cognitive phenomena” so cognitive psychologists propose that human learning is kinked and biased by some fundamental limits on how we process information, and what kinds of information we find important. Under all this there is the implicit belief that it’s a function of our wetware that has evolved in ways that are different in degree or kind from our primate siblings.
Where Pinker comes along is he starts off saying that humans have an instinct for learning language. Again, just about everyone who studies the developmental psychology of language would agree. He then says that problems like perception probably involve specialized cognitive structures. Again, cognitive psychologists who are big into information processing theory tend to agree on this. He then goes off his rocker and in Blank Slate puts forth this mythical conspiracy to deny the existence of human nature in the social and behavioral sciences. At this point, those of us who have more than a passing familiarity with cognitive information processing theory and developmental psychology who are going “what the fuck?”
From where I sit, Evolutionary Psychology goes beyond the tacit belief that human cognition has been shaped by evolution. From what I can tell, Evolutionary Psychology is characterized by a specific hypothesis that most of human behavior can be explained in terms of physically structured preferences that came about in a mythical Original Behavioral Environment. Most psychologists are less concerned about the ways in which human behavior may have been kinked in the paleolithic or neolithic, and are more interested in exploring the ways in which human behavior is kinked now.
Oh, yeah, another thing that’s curious about Evolutionary Psychology is it’s attempt to reach for evolutionary explanations of gender differences. While those of us who look at gender and learning see that there are multiple forms of discrimination and socialization at work, and that interventions such as girls-focused math and technology clubs show strong results for reducing the math gap.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20365182/?GT1=10252
Yet another idiotic “study”. What would these people do if they had to find a real job?? What’s next- “Paper Cuts Can Be Fatal?” or “Standing In The Rain Can Cause You To Get Wet”?
It’s reminding me too much of Cleese’s theory on brontosauruses.
And I bet if you had done the very same study back in the Roman period you would have found a preference for purple.
I myself love fuchia, but that’s because wearing a tailored fuchia suit really makes me obvious in the standard gray-suited crowd. (My feeling has always been–look, I’m female, I’m a gaijin, I’m always going to stand out. Might as well make it obvious.)
My favorite color is tartan………. Er…..
….nevermind
good googly-moogly, how much more not-science can you get than trying to use science to bolster common meaningless misconceptions that never needed science to become common and stay meaningless in the first place? i thought we gave up on trying to make science the footstool for ideology in the 50s.
In fact, pink was considered a much more robust, higher-energy, active color, so it was given to boy babies. While blue was seen as a calmer, more passive color, so it was given to girls.
As I recall, Marjorie Garber talks about this in the beginning of her book _Vested Interests_.
Using science to justify ideology is perfectly scientific: scientists working in the real world always have agendas, whether hidden or overt; and it doesn’t ideally matter to the scientific process what you’re trying to prove - much less why you’re trying to do so - so long as you go about proving it in the proper manner.
Of course, in this case, it’s kind of a moot point, since this study is hardly living up to those standards, so.
So girls like red and boys like green… well, clearly this means women have insatiable bloodlust and men really, really like trees.
I have a feeling that Anya Hurlbert is feeling a bit embarassed by this. Do a google search on her and you’ll see that she is a respected real scientist–again, I wouldn’t be surprised if the real paper gives many more details.
The background for this type of study is to see how people perceive things to understand how the brain works and to better design robots to see things (one of her papers talks about the constancy of colors–given the amazing changes in lighting and conditions, it’s a bit surprising that we don’t perceive that the color of objects change).
Thanks for your comments, CBrachyrynchos. It’s the version of EP that you capitalized and italicize that I’m worried about.
Basically everybody agrees that brains are evolved entities, and that this explains a lot about them. One of the distinctive and controversial claims of EP is that understanding this puts us in a position to make a bunch of interesting and detailed predictions about the operations of the mind. That’s where I get off the bus. Brains don’t linger in the fossil record, and we don’t have sufficiently good access to exactly how things were in the era of evolutionary adaptation to extrapolate contemporary human psychology from it. Certainly not enough to make judgments about which sex will like which color better.
Neil: Yeah. EP strikes me as somewhat circular in its argument that we can make claims about modern human behavior based on social conditions that existed in the paleolithic, but that vision of the paleolithic is based on idealized extrapolation from societies involving modern humans. Noting that there is a statistically significant difference in color preferences in modern humans is one thing and perhaps has some practical significance. Hypotheses as to the evolutionary origins of this preference are problematic due to the fact that behavior isn’t well preserved in the fossil record.
Isn’t it also problematic because the brain is itself so, well, plastic, and is itself shaped, altered, etc. through the course of life. I mean the neural pathways established by living an entire life in China vs living an entire life in Britain, would make the cultural differences a matter of biology in that cultural patterns of interaction shape the creation and excitement of particular neural networks. It seems that the issue of socialization in an something like this–particularly when noting the differnce between the British and the Chinese–makes evolutionary claims for particular preferences exceedingly difficult to sustain. I mean, it would seem we’re close to “not even wrong” territory.
Well my favourite colour is silver, so that means I’m from the future.
This was in the Courier Mail yesterday:
with men developing a preference for the blue skies that signalled good weather for hunting, while women foraged locally for fruit and berries.
Wouldn’t sunny days be good for gathering? And rainy times be good for getting birds, who tend to sit on branches more and fly about less? And wouldn’t red represent a successfully wounded animal which could then be chased down by primitive hunters?
“I have a feeling that Anya Hurlbert is feeling a bit embarassed by this.”
I’ve read the paper, and I for one wholeheartedly hope she is embarrassed.
with men developing a preference for the blue skies that signalled good weather for hunting, while women foraged locally for fruit and berries.
But the study didn’t find a preference for blue only in men. Both women and men preferred blue to other colors. Note that this finding is ignored in the popularizations completely. For instance, there seems to be no reason to dress little baby boys in blue anymore, or at least both sexes should prefer blue outfits.
The evolutionary explanation has a lot of problems, as has been noted. For one thing we actually have no idea what the division of labor then was between the sexes. We don’t even know when the “when” was. It’s just JustSo stories.
Lauredhel blogged on this on Hoyden-About-Town and I commented there.
Since the Chinese-born subjects had a much more uniform response to color than UK-born subjects, it’s pretty obvious that color preference is either cultural, or related to some difference in the Chinese versus UK genome.
We already know about the cultural pressures. But I also found research that says Asian men are less than half as likely as Caucasian men to have color vision anomalies that would make the red end of the spectrum uninteresting. It’s 3 percent versus 8 percent.
Sounds like correlation (people tend to like colors they can actually see and enjoy) interpreted as causation (evolutionary blue hunting sky/pink grapefruit stuff) to me.
What would be interesting would be to find out when (and where) blue=boy became the rule, and why. And if it followed the path MAJeff described, the transformation of a statistical observation into a universal rule.
That’s actually sort of the shorthand I use to describe normalization:
statisticual norms are transformed into social universals and then conjured into moral imperatives.