Red Bad
Colour and meaning: Why do some colours seem to have some inherent meaning? How is it that we have cultural standards for colour to indicate meaning?
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Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer, for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights and this week we're discussing why is red bad? Nick, why is red bad? Well yeah, so the reason that we're talking about this is the other day I was watching something about the original Ghostbusters film and there was a discussion about the appropriateness of the icon which, as you probably remember, was like a classic ghost in a white sheet behind one of those prohibition circles that circle with a line through it. And it occurs to me, when I think about the street signs that we have in the UK, even though we think of green as go and red as stop, maybe because of traffic lights, that the redness of those signs sort of feels right, but our kind of yes you're allowed to do this signs in the UK are blue. Now the question is, is that something universal? Is it universal because we've all just transmitted that idea across the world culturally? And then secondly, well if it is universal, is it inherent in some way? Are there something to do with the psychology of colour, which means that we naturally perceive colours to have those sorts of connotations, that green is basically good, that red is basically bad?
Speaker B:That's the question. It's an interesting question, Peter. So yeah, there does seem to be a sort of standards have coalesced into an international standard where we look at traffic lights, red is bad, red is like stop now, and green is go. But I think a lot of the kind of the international dimension to this standardisation is probably just born out of convenience and a need for a standard or a convenience of a standard that you don't want to find yourself in Japan and be faced with a purple light and not know what to do. Stop. What would you do if you saw a purple light? I would stop. I'd stop because that's
Speaker A:probably the safest thing to do, right? Yeah. And then what if it turned to cyan? Then I'd probably look left and right and see what everybody else is doing and follow their lead.
Speaker B: fied as a phenomenon in about: Speaker A:other stuff. I mean, I think what's interesting sitting here, I can see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 red lights, actually, three of them on their microphones to let us know that they're recording. One on your TV, which is standby. I don't know what colour that goes to when it's actually playing. And one on this speaker woofer thing. I don't know that it's red. Anyway, I don't want to make of that. But also think about lights and colours. I'll tell you what to make of it. Go on. And this is really surprising. Well, it's not really surprising if you know anything about anything. But red LEDs, as I understand it, are super easy to make. And green LEDs are harder to make. And blue LEDs have only just really been invented at anything like a cost that could make them mass produced. So cool looking tech with, you know, with blue LEDs. That's the new, that's the new LED. But that is some something completely random to do with material science to do with. Yeah, I think just the chemistry, the ease of making the chemistry in the chip. Also thinking about other uses of so red and green makes me think of Porden Starboard on ships. That's true. You know how just for listeners. And there's no stop go about that. But just in case any listener out there doesn't know how to tell which is which the answer and I don't know, a girl from Portsmouth taught me this. There's a little red port left in the bottle. Red port left. Nice. Yeah. Isn't that great? Why doesn't everyone in the world know
Speaker B:that? Even easier is port and left. I have a similar approach. But it's kind of is it one of my green and right have the same number of letters? Yes, but it doesn't mean that you know which is red or red. Well, my heuristic is that port left and red are the shorter of the three words in those two in those three pairs. But you'd have Yeah, okay. Anyway, anyway, going back to the
Speaker A:original question, is there anything in nature that is red and means stay away? Because this yellow and black. So this is the question right now I am almost always going to default to a position that if there is some phenomenon that humans generally agree on across the world, I will tend to assume in the absence of any other convincing evidence that this is some something innate, probably something that we've evolved. So something which is true of the evolutionary environment that humans or even going further back, that perhaps, you know, are, you know, mammal or even further back ancestors of old, because that that's always a good explanation for stuff. And I want it to be the case that red is bad, because red is the color of blood. It seems so convincing. Tragically, there's absolutely no evidence for this at all. Like we can there it doesn't seem to be any. I mean, although certain certain color associations are universal, there is also plenty of evidence that they don't don't appear to be universal enough to make that true. Like there are plenty of cultures out there where they red means completely different things to what we mean it. And the thing is that so so it seems to be the case, as Peter was was saying, that in the case of color, which I find surprising, because it's so fundamental, it's such a such a completely salient feature of our experience, that actually, the associations we have, we have with colors, there doesn't seem to be much foundation for the idea that they're, you know, that they're innate.
Speaker B:Well, yes, I mean, there's lots of evidence for it. But as you say, there's no sort of cultural commonality. But I mean, apart from blood, and I was, but you might say fruit.
Speaker A:See, I mean, if you take green, fruit is red. So fruit is good, right? Fruit is seeing red against a green background. And makes you think fruit.
Speaker B:Fruit often signals with red and lower hue colors that it's ready for eating. But no, I'm thinking like fire is an obvious example that mammals of all, of all epochs have had to worry about. It's orange. Well, hot glowing things are red. So rocks that are hot are red. And lava is red. So hold on, I just feel we're slightly descending into a conversation about yeah,
Speaker A: , certainly: Speaker B:Yeah, there's quite, there's quite a lot of interesting psychology about the perception of color. And there's lots of, you know, and drawing on the science of design. There's lots of people who've done work looking at work in terms of the visual metaphors that are appropriate for certain things. Particularly interesting study, it's been around quite, quite a while, the visual, the effect of language on color. So assuming a certain cultural background and assuming a certain language has an effect on your perception of color. So examples such as in Russian, there are distinct words for light blue and dark blue, whereas in English, we just say they're all just shades of blue. And the over, the over Hibiya people of Namibia and Angola, they have no word for green. Because they never see it. Well, they agree, they lump blue and green together, they have one word that represents blue and green. And that, and with robust testing, they've, these peoples have been found to have different perceptions of color. So having a, having a word for a thing makes you more like more able to spot the difference between...
Speaker A:Well, I'm going to jump in and say that this is a controversial interpretation of these findings. Because the example being, if you said something like, look, printers are able to discern, you know, 200 different types of font. So therefore, printers have a different perception of the world. No, you might say, well, no, all it shows is that they know more, they have learned more about those things. And that those things are relevant enough for them to have constructed words that separate them. Now, it doesn't mean that with the right training, you know, a Western European couldn't be taught the difference between these colors. So now, so although you're, I understand what you're saying, but all I'm saying is that...
Speaker B:This test is a test in their inherent, at the moment, ability to distinguish shades of color. So they, the way that the test works is they're shown a ring of colored squares, eight or 10 squares. Sometimes they're shown all the same color. And sometimes there will be a color, which is very obviously different. And then sometimes they're shown a color, which is a few shades different from the other ones. And those tests are conducted with peoples from different, lots of different cultures. And then the results are aggregated up. So you're able to compare people's perception of whether a thing is blue or versus green, with other people's categorization of that color, plus their color sensitivity to the different shades. Cause if there's always a null result where they go, I can't see any difference in the color here. So I'll tap the center of the screen where there is no, you know, to indicate there's no color difference I can see. So the test is robust. No, well, no, but it can't distinguish between
Speaker A:a circumstance where someone cannot tell the difference between two colors, because they don't have, let's just say, don't have the words that separate those two colors. And one where they haven't been taught to see them as separate colors. Now, I know we think that being able to see things as separate colors is our assumption is that that's sort of an inability you're born with. You can't train someone to, but it strikes me that it might not be, you know, it might be that with sufficient training in being shown lots of different, apparently identical greens, you know, you could learn to distinguish them in much the same way that a doctor could learn to distinguish between a healthy patient. But that's not what the test is. But it is, that's exactly what that's how you describe it. You just said that what they're asked to do is look for colors that are different to one another. And if they can't tell that two colors that are different are different, then they will report that they can't tell any difference. And what I'm saying is that people who are able to distinguish between different shades, they might be doing that because the language they have has sort of caused them to be able to distinguish between them. Or they might be doing it because they have simply been, they're so familiar with green that they have learned that there are differences where they might consciously be unaware that there were differences before. So that's all. It doesn't necessarily favor the, you know, color differences are driven by language hypothesis. It might be color differences are driven by training in distinguishing color differences. Few. I'm completely lost. I just want to point out that Peter's interpretation of these results is not totally universally accepted and uncontroversial. No, no, but it's
Speaker B:but this is evidence for it's not. I will give you that. It's not certainly conceived that it's not it's not. It's not complete proof of this hypothesis. But it's a nice. It's a nice working theory. I can't remember what the hypothesis was. That your language that you used to describe shades of color. Yeah. Has an effect on your perception of color. Got it. Okay. So it's this
Speaker A:old sort of language sort of affecting, I don't know. Yeah, I would, I would, I would possibly advance the theory that's the other way around. That if in a culture where distinguishing different shades is important, you would evolve a language that enabled you to do that. As I said to go back to the printers, Times New Roman and Bookman old style might look similar to the untrained eye, but to a printer, they would go, well, that's clearly one font. And that's another now it doesn't mean they perceive the world differently as such. It just means that they
Speaker B:haven't been trained. Okay. Okay. I think we can, I think we can extend the conversation beyond color. What? I think we, we, we, we wanted to, we, we kind of originally just talked about discussing sort of signs, signals, messages. Yeah. But you'll give now you're giving away
Speaker A:to listeners. The fact that we occasionally discuss these podcasts in advance. Well,
Speaker B:we do, but only very secret, only very, only, we only set the title and the kind of general parameters for the podcast. It's not in any way rehearsed over to Nick. No, it's not in any way rehearsed. So there's a lot of really interesting kind of visual metaphors that are kind of universal as well as like color, like stop meaning like red, meaning stop and, or, or green, meaning go or green, meaning green, meaning optimism and green, sort of environmentalism and things. So the, there's a shout out to Jack Burton, who wrote a really fascinating book called Semiotic, Seminology of Graphics. He was a French cartographer who, who basically wrote the book quite literally on the visual metaphors that are used in cartography and design generally to refer to certain concepts or to invoke certain emotion or to suggest certain outcomes like jagged edges being dangerous and smooth edges being more friendly and shaded different types of shading representing different things. If you, if you, if you have, if you buy one book on design, get that one because it will, it will really inform the way you, the way you go about things. But I think this sort of, these, these visual metaphors are as strong as the color metaphors. So you have nice smooth edges to, to invite people and you have jagged sharp looking edges to ward people off. Think about maps with, with cliffs being quite jaggedy and, and nice flowing contours being friendly. And Nick's jagged clothes. Yeah, Nick's, yeah, Nick's sort of glam rock appearance. My Mad Max
Speaker A:jacket with all the spikes on it. That's the one. Yeah, yeah. A clear metaphor if ever there was one.
Speaker B:So I think beyond the color, there's quite a sort of strong international, is it an international standard for, for, for, for, for visual representation that's beyond color. And yeah, but doesn't really help us get any closer to is it innate?
Speaker A:I mean, the thing is that we've, in typical Aleph style, we've dived straight over the normal bit of debate. It's straight into the kind of fundamentals. And we haven't covered any of the superficial bits, but it might be worth touching on a few. And I, and I think so that, you know, the, just, just to point out, I think that people, in case there's any listeners who think that, you know, color preferences do have significance. Simply that, that might be true, but you should doubt it. So if you take, you know, the red, red for red or pink for girls, um, blue for boys, about as fundamental a distinction as in the West, you know, when you're going to buy toys and things, it's all over the place. It's very, very recently, highly gendered, very recent as you, it was the other way around a hundred years ago, as is commonly known. And, um, that's, that's a bit of a myth. Is it? So it's a myth that it's, it's a myth that it was
Speaker B: a fairly recent, uh, it's the: Speaker A: ut it's often associated with: Speaker B:than ever. Is your, is your son going to grow up to be a seriously repressed homosexual now?
Speaker A:Well, I don't know if that has got, as we know, there's got nothing to do with color preference. Okay. Let's wrap up there. Well, I will say one more thing. Go on. If there are any bees listening, none of this will make any sense to you at all because bees do have inherent color preferences. It's been proven that you can't, you can't train a bee to like, you know, green flowers. They will only like flowers, which are red and yellow and stuff. Yeah. So apologies to any bees that this has probably been a waste of your time. Yeah. But also, I mean, not to make them feel bad because flipping it the other way around with the reason why we're all afraid of bees apart from the fact they sting, but is because they signal that they can sting by being yellow and black or orange and brown, right? Yeah, bees. Sort yourselves out. Okay. Thank you as always for listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights. Until next time. Bye-bye.
