Color Preferences, Color Harmony, and the Quantitative Use of Colors

Abstract

One hundred and forty-eight subjects participated in an experiment in which each subject had 1) to indicate the magnitude of his or her preferences between all pairs of seven surface colors and 2) to later use the same seven colors in a coloring task so as to create as harmonic a painting as possible. A scaling procedure due to Saaty was employed to compute for each subject a numerical measure of the consistency of his or her preference judgments and, subsequently, to construct a ratio scale of the strength of each person's preferences for the seven colors [1, 2]. It was found that 1) color preferences can be meaningfully measured on a ratio scale, 2) the derived intensities of color preference are largely accounted for by Munsell's laws of harmony, which can be extended to derive quantitative relations between surface colors with known Munsell designations, and 3) the intensities of color preference and the quantitative use of colors in a content-free coloring task are strongly related within the same individual.