Pink and Blue

[differenceblog]

Gerianne M. Alexander's 2003 review suggests that there may be evolutionary reasons why girls prefer some toys and boys prefer others. She suggests that there may be innate visual biases that draw children to specific features of the toys, including color:Compared to boys, girls are also more likely to use a greater number of colors and to prefer

Comments

[astrogeek01]

girls are also more likely to use a greater number of colors and to prefer warmer colors (i.e., pink and red) to cooler colors (i.e., blue and green)

So my question is: if boys use a limited # of colors in the cool colors, and girls use a wide variety of colors that span the whole spectrum, girls will, by default, use warmer colors than boys.

object movement and location vs. form and color

Ok, movement I get, and color I get... but what do they mean by location and form?

children as young as 3 identify colors with sex roles

There are studies that show from infancy boys and girls are handled and treated differently. Those years when babies are wide-eyed and just absorbing things as fast as they can introduce a huge number of cultural gendertypes. (hee, i made a new word!) I honestly think that there's no way to say that three year olds haven't absorbed pink==girls from society.

[differenceblog]

#1 is a very good point that I hadn't thought of. The "pig sexing" experiment mentioned in paragraph two used colors that were just darker, and not warmer or cooler: light pink, dark pink, and lavender vs. brown, navy, and maroon.

#2 seems to be referring to free drawing experiments. boys tend to draw map views, whereas girls draw things in face-on rows more often.

#3 Yeah. There's some evidence from newborns that female infants will hold eye contact and recognize faces longer and faster than male infants, but that's hardly color preference. I want to check more of the experiments referenced in Alexander's review. I only really looked at the vervets, which I already had problems with, But how cool a job do you have when you're giving monkeys toys?!!?!?

[astrogeek01]

hehe, you totally need a job like that :) :)

[differenceblog]

working on it :)

[mycrust]

What are the half-assed theoretical reasons that pink is supposedly linked with girls and blue with boys? Or is it just supposed to be a random assignment? (This question applies to both believers in cultural assignment of color preference and the evolutionary psychology crowd)

[differenceblog]

I'm not sure what you're asking, since three of the theories are listed above. (red like food, red like males, red like babies)

Of course, another thing I've heard, and haven't verified yet, is that reds were considered too passionate a color for women at the end of the 19th century, and that pink/blue used to be reversed.

I should look into that.

[mycrust]

Ah, you're foolishly assuming I have basic reading comprehension skills.

I can understand the argument that being more keyed into color might help you forage for food, but babies and men have red faces? Isn't that idea a little, y'know, white-centric?

[differenceblog]

Isn't that idea a little, y'know, white-centric?

Damn. I knew there was a point I wanted to make and forgot about. Yes, that was my impression, too. Of course, since white people tend to control what we look at (at least in this country) as "cultural norms", that's not entirely surprising.

[goteam]

My feelings about the color pink have generally ranged from "ew" to "meh" (further proof that I'm broken as a girl or something), so this particular avenue of research pretty much always drives me crazy. I really like reading that pink used to be for boys and blue for girls. Did you see the big NYTimes magazine article about princesses (which referenced the pink/blue swap) last week?

[differenceblog]

No, I missed that one. I better go find it and add it to the "write about this" queue before it gets too stale.

[laurenhat]

I can't get to the full articles from here (from MIT I could get to some of them at least, I think). So it's hard for me to evaluate the actual science. In general, evolutionary psych stories tend to irritate me, because often you can make up just so stories to suit any evidence -- if boys liked pink in our culture, I'm sure we could think of evolutionary reasons why that would make sense, too. We're influenced by cultural norms from very early on -- it could be that there are gender preferences for certain colors because we tend to surround kids with gender-congruent (by our norms) colors from birth, for instance. Maybe those colors are more comforting. I can make up lots of stories, and to me, anyway, the ontogenetic often ones seem more likely than the phylogenetic ones... but it's very hard to tell given that kids are immersed in social and cultural stimuli from birth. I guess we'd have to go somewhere like Belgium and run comparison tests to even begin to try to separate these things.