<p>To start off with, I am not a psychologist, nor do I know very much about it beyond behavioural economics.</p>
<p>A long time ago I decided to find my exact favourite colour. I knew it would be a yellow, so I started looking at a colour picker, and very roughly, randomly picking out different yellows. I kept zooming in on the ones I liked best to get more precise. To my surprise, I found that my favourite colour is the Platonic form of yellow <span class="math-container">$(255,255,0)$</span> in RGB coordinates. As much red and green as possible and no blue. Now, in the colour picker I was using, the hue of this yellow was not in a special position, but the saturation and lightness were, which could have biased my choice. Still, the fact that, without checking the coordinates, I found my way to exactly the hue of this very specific yellow is surprising. I tried a few friends and found similar results in most cases. One particularly impressive one was very close to, as I recall, <span class="math-container">$(127,127,255)$</span>. As much blue as possible and half of the possible red and green. It is very unlikely that the way the colour picker displayed the colours could have biased that result.</p>
<p>Now this isn't exactly science, it's a memory from years ago involving a handful of people. A better experimental design would be to randomly order colours with incremental changes in their red, green and blue, and then do the same for colours close to the favourite from the sample, and repeat.</p>
<p>People like simple musical pitches. On a base two logarithmic scale, they like pitches which can be expressed as fractions of a fixed pitch, with quite low denominators. We know this because that's how music works. The hypothesis is that people have a similar affinity for colours. If we consider RGB coordinates scaled so that <span class="math-container">$(1,0,0)$</span> is red, <span class="math-container">$(0,1,0)$</span> is green and <span class="math-container">$(0,0,1)$</span> is blue, then we prefer colours that have coordinates which are fractions on this scale, with low denominators. Has this ever been observed?</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-02-03T11:08:17.123Z
Welcome to Psychology.SE. Does searching "colour preference" in [Google Scholar](https://scholar.google.co.uk/) help with anything? Is there anything it doesn't address within your question? Is there anything in the search you don't understand? [Showing prior research](https://psychology.meta.stackexchange.com/q/993) not only helps others learn, but it also helps us to help you. Please [edit] your question to provide more information on what you have read on this subject and any problems you are having understanding your research (e.g. confusions/contradictions maybe).
Chris Rogers
CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-02-03T15:43:11.883Z
I'd consider a couple things: 1) These colors are only 'simple' according to the common methods used to display images on screens. They are very much *not* simple in other ways: they're not common in nature, not easy to print on a page, etc. They're also completely different on different screens, despite the same RGB code. 2) As such, these colors are really quite extreme and unusual.
Bryan Krause
CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-02-05T08:15:06.710Z
@BryanKrause Could you elaborate? I had assumed that basing computer graphics on red, green and blue light was because the eyes detected these three frequencies, and so it did have a relationship to nature.
Thomas Anton
<sensation><color><aesthetics>
Do people prefer simple colours?
Thomas Anton
# Do people prefer simple colours?

(Asked by: username_0 on 2023-02-03)

To start off with, I am not a psychologist, nor do I know very much about it beyond behavioural economics.

A long time ago I decided to find my exact favourite colour. I knew it would be a yellow, so I started looking at a colour picker, and very roughly, randomly picking out different yellows. I kept zooming in on the ones I liked best to get more precise. To my surprise, I found that my favourite colour is the Platonic form of yellow $(255,255,0)$ in RGB coordinates. As much red and green as possible and no blue. Now, in the colour picker I was using, the hue of this yellow was not in a special position, but the saturation and lightness were, which could have biased my choice. Still, the fact that, without checking the coordinates, I found my way to exactly the hue of this very specific yellow is surprising. I tried a few friends and found similar results in most cases. One particularly impressive one was very close to, as I recall, $(127,127,255)$. As much blue as possible and half of the possible red and green. It is very unlikely that the way the colour picker displayed the colours could have biased that result.

Now this isn't exactly science, it's a memory from years ago involving a handful of people. A better experimental design would be to randomly order colours with incremental changes in their red, green and blue, and then do the same for colours close to the favourite from the sample, and repeat.

People like simple musical pitches. On a base two logarithmic scale, they like pitches which can be expressed as fractions of a fixed pitch, with quite low denominators. We know this because that's how music works. The hypothesis is that people have a similar affinity for colours. If we consider RGB coordinates scaled so that $(1,0,0)$ is red, $(0,1,0)$ is green and $(0,0,1)$ is blue, then we prefer colours that have coordinates which are fractions on this scale, with low denominators. Has this ever been observed?

**Tags:** sensation, color, aesthetics

> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: Welcome to Psychology.SE. Does searching "colour preference" in [Google Scholar](https://scholar.google.co.uk/) help with anything? Is there anything it doesn't address within your question? Is there anything in the search you don't understand? [Showing prior research](https://psychology.meta.stackexchange.com/q/993) not only helps others learn, but it also helps us to help you. Please [edit] your question to provide more information on what you have read on this subject and any problems you are having understanding your research (e.g. confusions/contradictions maybe).  
> **username_2**: I'd consider a couple things: 1) These colors are only 'simple' according to the common methods used to display images on screens. They are very much *not* simple in other ways: they're not common in nature, not easy to print on a page, etc. They're also completely different on different screens, despite the same RGB code. 2) As such, these colors are really quite extreme and unusual.  
> **username_0**: @BryanKrause Could you elaborate? I had assumed that basing computer graphics on red, green and blue light was because the eyes detected these three frequencies, and so it did have a relationship to nature.  

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## 0 answers

