Commentary: An experimental study of gender and cultural differences in hue preference

Citation: Witzel C (2015) Commentary: An experimental study of gender and cultural differences in hue preference. A commentary on An experimental study of gender and cultural differences in hue preference by Al-Rasheed, A. S. Color preferences are a curious phenomenon. At first view, they seem to depend on the idiosyncrasies of individual observers and culture. At the same time, color preferences also involve regularities that are stable across individuals and cultures. In this way, color preferences highlight how seemingly arbitrary cognitive judgments are shaped by determinants that are not arbitrary at all. In a recent study, Al-Rasheed (2015) has demonstrated the dependence of color preferences on culture and gender by comparing English and Arabic observers. The article concludes that " color preference varies with both sex and culture and that sex differences in color preference also vary culturally " (p. 4). While the observation of cultural and sex-specific differences is very much in line with previous studies, the conclusion that sex differences vary by culture is not. Although it is true that some previous studies failed to identify systematic effects of gender on color preferences within cultures (for a brief review see Al-Rasheed, 2015, pp. 1–2; see also Palmer and Schloss, 2010); those studies did not test for cross-cultural patterns of sexual differences. In contrast, a recent study compared English and Chinese color preferences and found strong similarities in sex differences across these two fundamentally different cultures (Hurlbert and Ling, 2007). At the same time, another cross-cultural study (Taylor et al., 2013) contradicted those findings and suggested that sex differences varied between British observers and the Himba, a non-industrialized culture in rural Namibia. However, some of the cross-cultural effects observed in that study (Taylor et al., 2013) might be due to effects of measuring color preferences of non-industrialized remote observers on a computer screen (Sorokowski et al., 2014). A recent study introduced a new approach to test for similarities in sex differences across cultures (Sorokowski et al., 2014). This study compared color preferences in Polish participants to those of the Yali, a remote, non-industrialized tribal community in the mountain area of Papua, Indonesia (Sorokowski et al., 2014). In that study, Papuan observers had also very different color preferences than Polish observers, and there were pronounced differences across the sexes. Most importantly, however, this study revealed a very strong cross-cultural similarity in the way in which the color preferences of women …