Ecological Valence

What it is

The theory relocates the explanation, because there is nothing to account for about a wavelength and what needs accounting for is the set of objects that happen to carry it, so a colour attached to agreeable things accumulates a positive valence and one attached to disagreeable things accumulates a negative one. That makes the theory predictive about change, which is what distinguishes it from a restatement, since if liking comes from association then liking should move when the associations move.

Karen B. Schloss, Rosa M. Poggesi and Stephen E. Palmer tested exactly that in 2011 with fifty-seven Berkeley participants tested at Berkeley and forty-six Stanford participants tested at Stanford, each rating forty colours one at a time, and each group rated its own university's colours higher than the rival's with the gap growing by self-rated school spirit; since students are unlikely to have chosen a university on the basis of pre-existing colour taste, the causal arrow runs from affiliation to preference. A related conference paper by the same group reports the theory accounting for about eighty per cent of the variance in average colour-preference ratings from affective ratings of similarly coloured objects, and that figure comes from the conference paper rather than from the journal article and is labelled accordingly.

In effect

The commercial reading is simple and it is not the one the decks reach for, because a colour nearly nobody dislikes cannot offend a category of customer, which is a perfectly good reason for a bank, a hospital system or an enterprise software company to use blue, and it is a claim about avoiding downside rather than about producing an effect. The Berkeley and Stanford result is also the familiarity confound in its purest form, since if belonging to something can manufacture a preference for its colours then a category in which every incumbent is blue is a category in which blue will test well, and the test will be measuring the convention. One further detail reaches this record through Schloss's personal communication relayed in a peer-reviewed commentary rather than through the published paper, that the data show a significant interaction involving another shade of red, so Stanford students liked Stanford red more than they liked a different dark red, and that is recorded as a personal communication.

What it does not say

It does not say a liked colour persuades, reassures or sells, because what the theory explains is a rating of how much somebody likes a colour, and the step from a preference to a mechanism is the step the trade takes and these papers do not, so treating ecological valence as evidence that blue builds trust reverses what it was built to account for. It does not explain blue in particular either, since the theory's content is that preferences follow associations and blue is an illustration of it, and any colour whose associated objects people like would behave the same way. Its own evidence is preference ratings in laboratory conditions, the eighty per cent figure that circulates with it comes from a conference paper rather than the journal article, and the 2010 full text was not read for this record, so the account here rests on the abstract. And it does not say the associations are the same everywhere, because the theory is explicitly about what a given population's colours are attached to, which means it predicts variation rather than ruling it out, and the thirty-nation data on colour and emotion show the global pattern is strong while the national ones differ.

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