How Does Color Psychology Work?
A lot of people only think of color as being cosmetic, but it’s actually much more important than that. Color psychology teaches that color is light and a source of life, meaning that there are a lot of reactions to it on a level far beyond whether it is cosmetically enjoyed. It is also seen to be nature’s signaling system, letting us know about danger and all sorts of other issues that might be important. Primitive man didn’t have the knowledge and the science that we have today to go by, so he (or she) had to use colors and other information to make a determination about what was safe and what was not. The primitive instincts that were thought to be important back then are not thought to mean much now, but our reaction to colors indicate that those instincts still matter.
Even though we might today be contemplating something in the grocery store instead of in a mud hut or in the forest, that doesn’t mean that we don’t care what color it is. Color has very powerful connotations, and if the color of something turns us off we’ll likely avoid that product and buy something that makes us feel better, even if we’re not conscious of doing so. Sometimes we just have a ‘gut feeling’ about something, and while not always related to color, it certainly can be affected by what we see and how that makes us feel. Red is a strong color, along with purple and other deep but vibrant colors. These colors can make us angry, and excitable, and also make us feel powerful. If we see something in the store with those kinds of colors on it we might feel empowered by buying it or it might turn us off. That can depend on the color, but also on our mood at the time, the package design, and what the product actually is.
There have been a lot of studies written on color psychology but none of them are really recent, and there’s a reason for this – researchers still can’t get results that are conclusive and descriptive enough to tell them anything more than they already know. This makes explaining how color psychology actually works very difficult, because there are not enough definitive answers to explain it beyond the psychological, emotional, and physiological responses that are seen. We know there is a reaction, we just can’t completely explain why.
