“What’s your favorite color?” is a common icebreaker question for interviews, dates, and just plain getting to know people. For many, the answer is a gateway into a person’s personality or their preferences, a way to get a person to talk about themselves and reveal why it’s their favorite. Some psychologists, however, believe the answer to this question reveals more about their intelligence than the average person would believe.
According to a report or two, a person’s color preference could be an indicator of their level of intellect. Per these reports, if a person’s favorite color is red, they claim their personality is louder, brasher, and more impulsive than a person whose favorite color is something else, marking that color as the favorite of the less intelligent. White is perceived as a color associated with professionalism and order. These articles and an old study point out that blue is the most common favorite color among intelligent people. Personality-wise, blue is associated with calmness, coolness, dependability, and dispassionate reason.
So does that mean that if you like the color blue that you’re smarter than those who don’t like it? Well, no. At least there is no evidence to truly support that. This is just a combination of finding a correlation between the color preferences of intelligent people and color psychology that is typically used in mass marketing. It’s emotions-based, not data-based.
Sure, if a person’s favorite color is red they could be more impulsive, brash, etc. but that doesn’t mean they aren’t smart. Red “means” many things. According to other experts (and likely your experience), red is also associated with excitement and danger. It’s also the color associated with love and romance. Even if all or none of these associations are true, this again doesn’t measure a person’s actual intellect with hard data. A person can like red because… well, they like red. Much like blue or any other color.
Another conflict in this “liking blue means you’re a smarty” theory is culture. Colors “mean” different things depending on where and how you have grown up. While blue is associated with intelligence, trust, and stability in the United States, there are parts of Latin America that associate it with mourning. White is perceived as a holy and peaceful color in most western countries, but is associated with illness in Ethiopia and death in many Asian cultures. In some cases the opposite is true, as black is associated with death in the U.S. while it’s considered a color of wisdom in parts of Africa. Depending on the person’s culture, their color preferences could be influenced by that rather than their intellect. These interpretations of color meanings can also change over time, too.
So while it is interesting to see that a sizable portion of smart people choose blue as their favorite color, it’s not a way to determine who is the smartest person in the room. Knowing a person’s favorite color could be an indicator to their personality, but more likely it’s a better way to determine what color of shirt to buy for them as a gift more than anything else.
This article originally appeared in June.
