|
RETURN
TO THE WORLD SCIENCE HOME PAGE
Is my red your red?
New findings
are re-igniting a controversy over how we develop our concepts of
different colors—and whether we all see them the same way.
May 31, 2005
Special to World Science
Do all peoples see and recognize the same colors?
Scientists disagree on the question. Two studies have shed new light on it, by
examining how some of the world’s most remote cultures view color.
The answer could have wide implications. It could reveal insights, some
researchers think, into how the brain, language and culture interact to shape
how we understand our reality—not only
its colors, but other aspects of it as well.
 |
Debi Roberson and colleagues studied the way
the Himba, a Namibian tribal community, classified colors. The above
diagram shows the range of colors that Himba referred to by a particular
color name. The Himba word corresponding to each group of colors is
printed over the group, with a dictionary's translation of the word into
English. The numbers over the squares represent the number of study
participants who chose that color as the "best example" of its
category. The diagram below shows the results obtained in a similar 1972
study of English speakers. In this case, the dots mark the squares that
were the most popular "best example" choices for their
categories. (Courtesy Debi Roberson, University of Essex)
|
Some researchers claim culture strongly shapes each person’s perceptions;
thus, although many cultures tend to categorize colors similarly, not all necessarily do.
This view is called the “cultural relativity hypothesis.”
Others scientists believe a basic color code exists all our brains. This is known as the “universalist” position.
In the new studies, scientists reached out to some little-known cultures to try to resolve the question.
They came up with new evidence for both views, putting the debate into greater focus.
Debi Roberson of the University of Essex in Colchester, U.K., and colleagues studied a Southern African tribal community whose members,
she reported, viewed colors quite differently from English speakers. They gave
the same name to blue and green, for example.
The results provide new “evidence for the cultural relativity hypothesis,” the researchers wrote in a study published in the June issue of
Cognitive Psychology, a research journal.
But a study in last week’s early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences, another journal, focused instead on the similarities in color
perception across cultures. The survey of speakers of 110 unwritten languages confirmed that there is “universal structure around which color categories are formed” in the brain, wrote
the University of Chicago’s Terry Regier and colleagues.
Both results echo past findings to some extent.
Various studies have shown that all peoples agree there are certain “basic colors,” and presented with an array of color samples, will agree
at least somewhat on which are “best examples” of each basic color. Yet people also differ widely in how they describe where the boundaries between colors lie—and these differences, far from being mere questions of definitions or semantics, affect their ability to remember and quickly discriminate between various colors.
One could try to settle the issue by saying both the cultural-relativity and the
universalist positions have some truth. Paul Kay of the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, Calif.,
a co-author of the Proceedings study, takes such a view. “The seeming dispute is less like an argument over whether a glass is
half-empty or half-full than like an argument over whether a glass has water in the bottom half or air in the top half,”
he wrote in an email to World Science.
But some researchers have rejected the idea that
this particular debate lends itself to compromise.
“The two theories invoke different premises and processes which cannot both be true,” wrote
Carl Ratner of Humboldt State University in Arcata, Calif., in the Autumn, 1989
Journal of Mind and Behavior. “How could the single act of color perception be composed of two disjointed, incompatible processes?”
Regier’s team argued that their findings should quell doubts about universal
tendencies in color perception, because their survey included a wide range of peoples from remote,
non-industrialized societies. This strategy was intended to answer critics who had claimed that previous studies backing the
universalist view had, in fact, focused narrow-mindedly on modernized societies while ignoring
others.
Regier’s research team showed 330 color chips to an average of 24 speakers in each of the 110 languages. They asked each observer to name every chip. Also, they asked each participant, with all the chips laid in front of them, to point and name the chip that best represented each of the basic colors.
The researchers found that no matter what language, responses, on average, were all similar to, or “clustered” around, the colors English speakers indicate as the best examples of black, white, red, yellow, green, and blue. These “universal best examples,”
Regier and colleagues wrote, “may be the source of universal tendencies in color naming.”
But Roberson said such findings may be unwarranted generalizations.
It’s true, she acknowledged, that some “central” or
“best-example” colors can be said to cluster for some languages. But not for
all languages, she added. Moreover, she said, studies have found people attach no special importance to these
supposed central colors until after language is learnt; and even then, people agree to only a limited extent on which
colors they are.
For instance, just seven of 42 indigenous New Guineans in one study agreed on a particular green chip as being the best-example color for “œnol, a name category that includes a large portion of English green, blue and purple,” she wrote in an email to
World Science.
For these reasons, she added, “category boundaries should be considered of, at least, equal
importance with the category centers.”
People of different cultures indeed can differ
wildly in recognizing boundaries, studies have found. The southern African Himba people in her
Cognitive Psychology study reportedly described chips of various colors, including light
purple, with a word translated as “black” in a dictionary of their language.
Not unlike Regier’s group, Roberson’s team conducted the study in Africa in part to answer criticisms that their stance was based on too limited research before that. They had previously studied only one cultural group thoroughly, the Berinmo language speakers of New Guinea, and “concerns remained as to how representative might be [this] tiny, extremely remote community,” the researchers wrote.
Kay, for his part, said Roberson may have misinterpreted some of her data from the Berinmo, and that in fact their color naming “accords very well with
universal tendencies.”
Kay and his colleagues have proposed that languages tend, over time, to develop
color words according to fairly consistent principles. First they distinguish black and white, then red, and so on.
(They usually lump other hues into one of these categories before
giving them their own names, or more rarely, simply leave them unmentioned.)
Under Kay’s scheme, therefore, a culture needn’t boast the same color terms other languages
have to be considered to follow the “universal” tendencies.
But if there are such tendencies, he and his co-authors added, it remains unknown what causes them.
The nature of color itself provides no obvious answers. The color spectrum is continuous; no
definite line divides any two colors. So there is no clear reason everyone should agree, for example, on what are red, yellow and green and blue, which
most people seem to recognize as the “basic colors.”
To go further, there isn’t even a clear reason why everyone should recognize these as basic colors. Someone could conceivably consider the “in-betweens,” like blue-green, to be basic, and then consider as “in-between” those that other people call basic.
There is no physical reason to favor one scheme over the other. Colors all result from different wavelengths—lengths of the waves in which light travels—or combinations of wavelengths. Any length or combination thereof is possible, hence no
clear reason to call any color basic.
Some possible reasons for universal tendencies in color naming, Kay and colleagues wrote, may include color appearance, such as the way some colors feel “warm” and others “cool”, or the frequencies with which colors statistically show up in the environment or the lighting sources available. There is no conflict between the universality of color-naming and the wide variation in color boundaries, they added, “provided one allows that the variation of category boundaries itself is constrained by universal forces.”
* * *
Send us a comment
on this story, or send
it to a friend
Front image courtesy U.S.
Geological Survey
References:
D. Roberson, J. Davidoff, I.R. Davies, L.R. Shapiro, 2005. Color categories: Evidence for the cultural relativity hypothesis.
Cognit. Psychol. 50, 378-411.
T. Regier, P. Kay, R.S. Cook, 2005. Focal colors are universal after all. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U S A.
102, 8386-91.
|