August 22, 2007
Why girls 'really do prefer pink'
From BBC News:
A University of Newcastle study found that women naturally opted for redder shades when given a choice. Writing in the journal Current Biology, experts say it may have helped women gather ripe fruit, or pick healthy mates. Most earlier studies into colour suggest a universal liking for blue, regardless of sex. This is one of the few studies that have tried to spot differences between the likes of males and females. The Newcastle team, led by Dr Anya Hurlbert, tested more than 200 men and women in their 20s, asking them to choose between colours on the computer screen. Women were far more likely to choose blue shades with more red mixed in, and more likely to reject more green and yellow hues.
One of the problems facing the researchers was to work out if this reaction is the product of years of British "blue for a boy, pink for a girl" culture. To do this, the group tested were a mixture of white British and Chinese volunteers. While the Chinese volunteers, male and female, also tended to favour red shades, not surprisingly since red is a "lucky" colour in China, the difference between men and women persisted. According to the researchers, this strengthened the idea that the preferences might be based in biology, rather than culture.
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 08:22 AM | Permalink
Comments
Interesting idea for a study, but the BBC article does not say how many Chinese subjects were tested - which is crucial to the cross-cultural conclusions the researchers were trying to reach.
On NPR yesterday, one of the researchers said they only had 35 Chinese subjects. I'm not sure if that is a statistically meaningful sample, and what the margin of error would be, but it seems rather small.
Posted by: Nizam Arain | Aug 22, 2007 9:46:07 AM
Urgh. Speculative nonsense like this ("We corrected for any cultural bias by throwing Chinese students in there! Their culture is so far off the map that only our common biology can explain any similarities! The limited reach of imperialist Western control has had such a minimal impact in global history that we can be certain our study is free of any untoward cultural influence!") is the reason that when good, methodologically sound scientific research on gender differences (and similarities, which far outweigh the differences) is done, people won't be able to distinguish it from all the useless noise like this.
It also seems a bit too obvious to point out that as early as the beginning of last century, and really up until then, pink was considered a manly color and blue was the color designated to little girls. But of course, as Roland Barthes observed decades ago, part of the work of culture is to make its particular idiosyncracies appear as universal and naturalized truths. If only researchers like this would stop doing the work of culture and take up the work of science.
Posted by: Kate | Aug 22, 2007 9:47:56 AM
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