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Cross-Cultural Psychology
Partitioning the Rainbow: The Influence of Culture on Color
Culture influences the way we divide a spectrum into colors.
Updated October 4, 2024 Reviewed by Lybi Ma
Key points
- Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. So is color, to a surprising degree.
- What Westerners regard as “pure” green is seen as a hybrid shade in other cultures.
- Language and culture affect ideas about which colors are primary.
- Global trade and communication has enforced a common language for describing color.
How many colors are in the rainbow? Seven said Sir Isaac Newton. Of course, Newton knew that a spectrum is just that, a continuous gradation from one color to another. But not all colors are equal. Red and blue stand out as "primary" while most other colors are mixtures.
We now know that the eye can distinguish millions of shades of color under ideal conditions. Modern marketing tries to capitalize on that remarkable ability. Benjamin Moore's “Off White Collection” of paint colors has 152 shades of creamy neutrals. Cosmetics firm M.A.C. offers 200 named colors of lipstick, nearly all of them reddish. While the eye can see fine distinctions, it’s hard to remember a color without a name. Although a few of M.A.C’s names cue the associated shade (Taupe, Flamingo, Russian Red), most suggest that color, like romance, is simply beyond words (Captive Audience, D for Danger, You Wouldn’t Get It).
Albert Munsell, an art teacher at the Massachusetts Normal Art School, was an unheralded cartographer of the world of color. Munsell devised a numerical system for identifying any perceptible color. His scheme is now familiar to anyone who’s used a graphics app. A color is defined by its position along three dimensions of hue, saturation, and brightness. (That’s what PhotoShop calls them. Munsell used the terms hue, chroma, and value.)
Munsell’s system was marketed as a looseleaf atlas of rigorously printed color swatches. Should you ask your friends to name the colors of swatches, you will find impressive agreement. One person’s green is another person’s green.
Things get more interesting when you assemble swatches into a color map. Using people’s identifications of swatches, we can identify one part of the color map as orange, another as green, and so on. The consensus names divide the map into colors—“nations” of a sort—with defined boundaries.
You might think that named colors would carve the map into mathematically equal bands. In fact, the sizes and shapes of the color regions are almost as arbitrary as those of the nations on the world map. Green occupies the largest share of a hue versus brightness map, while orange is the smallest. Pink’s region is bigger than red’s.
Then there’s brown. There’s no brown in the rainbow. The color map reveals that brown is actually dark yellow. (This can be confirmed by projecting a spot of yellow light on a screen in a dark room. If you turn down the brightness of the light, it will appear as a circle of brown.)
Global trade and communications boost a culture’s diversity of color terms. Trade brings phones, handbags, cars, and toys in marketable colors that require names. Above all, it brings clothing, which is often brightly colored with dyes that didn’t exist for most of history.
Today's industrialized nations speak much the same color language. But there are a few isolated societies with different ways of talking (and thinking) about color. One is the Berinmo people, a band of hunter-gatherers living along the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea. In a 1999 article, “Color categories in a stone-age tribe,” British psychologist Jules Davidoff and colleagues constructed a Berinmo color map.
The Berinmo language has five color terms. None of their boundaries correspond to those of the common English terms. The most expansive hue of the Berinmo color map is nol, which spans much of what English speakers call green, blue, and purple.
Consequently, the boundary between green and blue does not exist in Berinmo. Any such color is nol. But the Berinmo make a distinction that English speakers don’t, between wor and nol (which includes yellowish greens, yellow, orange, and lighter browns). The wor-nol boundary falls in the middle of our green.
Asked to name such a shade, Berinmo speakers are indecisive. Some call it wor, some call it nol. All agree it’s a hybrid color between the two. But to an English speaker, the color is simply green.
We accept that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But color seems more an objective fact. It nonetheless appears that the notion that some colors are "primary" or purer or more fundamental than others is an artifact of culture and language. Think of that the next time you see a rainbow.
The influence of culture on color was the subject of a somewhat alarming experiment. Linguist Guy Deutscher and his wife Janie Steen raised their daughter without ever telling her the color of the sky. They taught her all the usual English color terms, of course, but without ever connecting blue to the color of the sky. Then, when the daughter was able to speak, Deutscher began asking her, what color is the sky?
At first, the daughter was confused by the question. The sky does not have any color, she insisted. Deutscher kept asking, and one day the girl answered, white.
It was not a cloudy day. Deutscher had made it a point to pose the question only when the sky was a clear blue. He continued asking from time to time, and at long last the daughter gave the answer that her culture demanded: Blue.
References
Berlin, Brent, and Paul Kay (1992). Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. Berkeley: University of California Press. Revision of 1969 publication.
Davidoff, Jules, Ian Davies, and Debi Roberson (1999). “Colour categories in a stone-age tribe.” Nature 398, 203-204.
