The other week my wife and I were disagreeing over whether a house was green or blue. I was shocked when every passerby we asked agreed with her that it was green. I was absolutely 100% sure it was blue. Turns out according to this site, my boundary is greener than 95% of the population! Funny to see this proved out here!
I had the same discussion with the color of a river in Albania with my wife. The test says my boundary is a bluer than 85% of the pop - sounds about right!
Blue his house
With a blue little window
And a blue Corvette
And everything is blue for him
And himself and everybody around
'Cause he ain't got nobody to listen (to listen)
In the sitcom Mad About You there is an episode where Jamie tells Paul to put on a tie. Specifies the "navy blue one". "I don't own a navy tie." "Yes you do, it's the one that you think is dark green."
My wife and I go round and round about what is and isn't blue and/or green.
...I get different numbers depending on which eye I use, but both are fairly center. I didn't expect blue-green to be affected though! My left eye can't see certain shades of red as well as my right eye. Bright sunlight makes it more noticeable, but my own skin looks weirdly (sickly) yellowish with one eye and normal with the other.
Whenever it's come up at home, my spouse simply insists "I don't need to know the difference between aqua, turquoise, and seafoam. They're all blue." At this point I just nod and agree, it's not worth the fight anymore. ;)
...I never found another person with the same experience. Here we are. For me though, it's not that sunlight makes it more noticeable, it's that I will see the same shades until I've had too much sunlight—eventually my left eye gets tired, I guess, and sees a lot less red than my right eye. After sleeping it resets and I see the same shade in both eyes.
Maybe i should talk to a researcher about this..
I realized at a young age that one of my eyes receives a more blue-shifted image and the other's image is more red. It's difficult to tell by rapidly opening/closing one eye at a time, but by using my fist positioned with my thumb resting on my brow between my eyes, then rolling it left and right quickly to cover up one eye and focusing on what I'm looking at, it's a stark difference. I do it every so often to see if it's changed with age.. I especially enjoy looking at the sky or white sheets of paper.
I have this with a coat, but it's blue vs gray. Would be interesting to generalize this tool not just for other colours, but for other colour properties like saturation not just hue.
Speaking of, I'd be curious about a similar experiment but one that compares how grotesque, for lack of a better word, certain words sound. The word bleen makes me uncomfortable, I think because my brain automatically goes to spleen; grue isn't my favorite either but I prefer it to bleen.
I'm curious how universal that is though. Do others have similarly aligned preferences for one word over the other, or are our feelings about them more evenly spread?
Not a native speaker, bleen for me got auto corrected by my brain to green. It doesn't make me uncomfortable, but I'd prefer grue because my brain will immediately understand we're talking about the umbrella term. If grue is said out of context, I'd imagine Gru from despicable me, when written I'd imagine gruel, but, again, because I'm not a native speaker, instead of yucky food I'd instead think about that episode of Masha and the Bear where they end up with a houseful of the porridge.
That’s amusing because I am the converse: my boundary is bluer than 98% of the population. To a first approximation, blue is a very specific thing and all the other colors appear strongly non-blue to me. I do wonder where this preference came from, but it explains all the puzzling interactions between my wife and I over the years.
That's fascinating. I think this has to be biological. When I call something blue I don't think it has to do with just what I've learned but also that the color feels more like deep blue than it does like deep green.
My boundary is also greener than 95% of the population. I think it's because I mentally separate cyan from green and blue, but still see cyan as a shade of blue. If you asked me what color it was without forcing green or blue, I'd have answered cyan on most of them.
I think the alternative should be "this is not blue". I was served what I would call a "teal" or "turquoise" but the alternative button shows "this is green", which it was not.
I totally agree with you but it defeats the purpose of the site. It got to an obviously cyan color and I couldn't answer either way (it's not blue or green) so I closed it.
I closed it also. What's going to happen is all the people who care about the ambiguousness leave, so the resulting population is a bad sample even of the people who open the site in the first place.
OP's point is that this isn't valid because neither of the answers are correct. If you're really trying to measure a spectrum then the answers should allow for fuzziness. That is, you have a range/confidence interval of where green ends and where blue starts and in between is neither/both.
It should probably alternate between blue/notblue... green/notgreen. I hit the same wall. Second question asked if blue/green when it was neither... and I really mean neither. I don't see cyan as a shade of blue or green, rather much like I don't see green as a shade of blue or yellow.
Huh. I consider cyan to be blue, but it turns out it's made by mixing equal parts of blue and green light on an RGB display.
I guess that makes sense thinking about it now since it's not a deep blue, and there's obviously no red component, but I never thought of it as being defined as equal parts blue and green.
(Turquoise I would consider to be blue-green/both).
yeah I've always thought of cyan as just "blue, but really bright", which does make sense - you're going from 0, 0, 100 (blue) to 0, 100, 100 (cyan) so it's twice as far from pure black. I also see pure cyan as being much more blue than green.
If you gave me the exact same color code 20 times I might give you green 10 times and blue the other 10 because I genuinely can't tell the difference. So it's not a binary like you're claiming.
How would you feel about a test for "teal or blue" or "teal or green?" You still need to make binary choices, just along different boundaries. Would it make any difference?
if the question was "is this more blue or more green" it would be somewhat more agreeable. but there really just have to be a "can't decide" option as well.
But reproducibility should be the point. As a result of the structure it approaches an asymptote from one side or the other. I took it once and approached from green and my greenness was 77%, a second time it approached from blue and my blueness was 68%.
A test that allows an answer of neither would deliver more information (transition points and an error bar) without failing to identify a distribution in the population taking the test.
It's so remarkable how many people here refuse to understand your point. It's like, there is no right or wrong, no perfect score, just pure subjectiveness, and they can't handle it. If I wasn't convinced this site is entirely bots before, I might be now....
It is enlightening to see who has been fixed on math proofs as testing and who has been exposed to observational testing. Seems many people have been brain washed into the former, forgetting the latter exists.
>correctness is not the point. binary choice is the whole point. because my blue may not be your blue...
Realistically there is a broad range that we all can acknowledge is neither, but is instead teal, and forcing a binary choice means people just choose randomly.
I don't think that's necessarily the case. I understand that there's a continuum in reality, but psychologically, I still tend to perceive each shade as discretely either blue or green, especially when the shade is presented in isolation. Words like "teal", "cyan", etc. aren't really part of my normal vocabulary and to the extent that they are, I would think of them as subsets of blue or green, not disjoint sets.
I think the test can be fairly criticised on the basis that it is assuming everyone's psychological colour space has a discrete boundary between blue and green, which clearly isn't the case for some people (like you), but it is for others (like me).
But that is wrong. This doesn't test colour perception or vision, it tests verbal classification of colour perception into a forced binary. Everyone could be perceiving the colour qualia 100% identically, but simply choosing different linguistic cutpoints, meaning you can't say this is about vision / perception at all (it may just be about language use).
Agreed, there is no clear premise. Of course that different people looking at the same object will use different colour words is a triviality that anyone over, say, 10 years old knows. If that's the premise of the site, it is boring. People are getting excited because they think this implies something about differences in vision or perception... but it doesn't, that requires much more cleverness to test.
The attempted point being to measure and compare how people classify colors between blue and green when given a false dichotomy between the two.
But it cannot do that without bias, since people always have the third choice to drop out when they don't like their choices. There is also another bias, which is people will just select some random option when they want to say something equivalent to "blue-green" but don't have the choice, then they get a result biased in that direction but what has actually happened is they have given up. This random choice might be culturally biased towards people's preferred color. I personally selected green when that occurred for me and then just sat on green hammering that. Oh, I'm more willing to say green than other people? Meaningless, I wouldn't have called those colors green in a conversation.
When presented in a forum people also have the choice of criticising the false dichotomy which is what you are experiencing here. The point of posting it here is to get this sort of feedback, so...
Conjecture is precisely why you don’t understand the test. Bias is the point! Binary choice is how you derive it. No answer is not an answer. How do you not see this? Any conjecture on anything but the two options defeats the entire point of the test. The test is to find your bias towards blue or green. Cake or death.
It's like being asked whether yellow is more green or red. But it's different. You can't get yellow just from alpha blending green and red. You need additive color mixing.
Black and white are different. You can get grey just from blending them.
But the point is, there is no line which separates white and black (or green and blue). 50% grey is neither black nor white, it's grey. Turquoise is neither green nor blue, it's turquoise.
but when does turquoise start and end and green starts and blue ends? or is there just another color there between them. And then what about that color?
I think you're (accidentally?) hitting on exactly the point there.
For some people's language usage, blue and green are adjacent colors, and thus defining a point that divides them is perfectly fine.
For other people, these are not adjacent -- for some people, there's a single color (aqua? turquoise?) between them, and green and turquoise are adjacent colors, as are turquoise and blue, and it's reasonable to ask about a dividing point between those adjacent pairs.
For those who don't use language this way -- do you consider red and blue adjacent, or do you consider purple (violet?) a necessary intermediate? Are you comfortable defining a point between red and blue, or are you instead comfortable defining a point between red and purple, and a point between purple and blue?
And for all I know, there are people for whom blue and green (or blue and red) have a distance greater than one, or greater than two...
Although the question "is the color distinct and basic or just a shade?" is very subjective. Is pink distinct or a shade of red/purple? Is purple distinct or a shade of red/blue? Is green distinct or a shade of blue? (it's well-known that in Japanese green separated from blue only relatively recently, with very bluish traffic lights and other quirks included)
I don't know if there are people who treat turquoise and aqua as distinct, but I certainly treat them as distinct from blue (azure, cobalt) and green. Several of the colors around the mid range in the linked page are not colors I would use the words "blue" or "green" for. That doesn't mean that I have strict rules here; I don't actually know if I would call what you call "cyan" turquoise or blue; ditto plenty of other words like "seafoam." That's kind of my point -- modulo another poster's comment about this being a test of bad monitor calibration, it's really more about language than about color.
I think there's another set of questions here -- why is "blue-green family" a thing in your mind, rather than "blue-yellow family"? Is there a "red-blue family"? "Orange-blue"?
Our green cones are the most sensitive and their range significantly overlaps with red cones, so it's only natural that going from green towards red you'll be able to make clearer distinctions between colors than the other way.
Also, yellow-blue and red-green are opponents that can't be mixed because of how our retinas preprocess the signals from cones. Therefore, you obviously end up with blue-green (cyan), red-yellow (orange), yellow-green (lime) and blue-red (magenta, which actually doesn't exist on the light spectrum) families of related colors.
I see it as having a blue component and a green component. If the mixture has more green than blue, then it's green.
The analogous version in black and white is "is this dark grey or light grey?" because that's the one asking you to guess which side of the 50/50 split the color is on.
It’s not really the same, because black and white strongly connote being at the far ends of their continuum (lightness), and are thus opposites, whereas blue and green are more vaguely specified as nearby spots on their continuum (hue).
It's a linguistics thing, it's about word usage more than about colour. You ask someone to get a book off the shelf, and you say "get the blue book" and the person is confused because they see a green book.
We are usually not specific in our day-to-day language, and this exposes/clarifies the issue.
Wrong way to do it. We know from psychometrics that forced binaries like this just create junk (people disagree with the question, so just choose a forced answer based on some heuristic for each such question like "closest to my mouse / finger" or "most socially desirable" or "same as last time"). So you aren't measuring what you think when you force choice like this.
If you're going to go with linguistic self-report and a single item, you really want something like an 11-point Likert scale. A smart design might get e.g. a person's rating of "blue-ness vs. green-ness" on an 11-point scale, then determine the optimal cutpoint via e.g. clustering, logistic regression, or some other method, to really get something meaningful.
Is it really junk though? There are several comments in this thread like “people tell me I call stuff blue that they think is green and this quiz confirms that.”
Forced binary choices on single-item, self-report questions produce scientific junk, absolutely. This kind of design / approach encourages not only magnitude errors, but also sign errors (you can't even trust the direction of the observed effect).
IMO, growing up, unless you lived under a rock, it seems obvious to me that you will have experienced different people pointing at the same colour and uttering very different colour labels (pink vs. red, blue vs. green, black vs. deep blue/purple, etc) from the labels you might have applied yourself. Differing/shared colour perception isn't exactly a rare kind of topic (almost is like the canonical stoner topic, also common online), so I'd be a bit surprised if this demo is actually introducing anyone to this concept already. Any excitement is surely from other implications people think the demo has.
But unfortunately there are no interesting implications from what this site shows. Yes, it demonstrates the boring fact that: "it isn't clear how different people assign different color labels to the same physical stimuli" (and yes, this is FALSELY assuming that everyone's monitors/screens are the same too), but if you didn't already know this... I'm not sure exactly what social context you could have possibly grown up in.
In linguistics this sort of thinking comes from 'basic color term' theory, which lays out heuristics for deciding if a word for a color in a given language is 'basic'. 2 things going against these blue-green terms are:
* They refer to specific objects (a duck and a stone), eventually these referents can be transcended though, like with the case of orange.
* Their frequency is roughly similar to each other (along with cyan, aqua, etc.), so there's no one term for this range (e.g. there's no doubt in a corpus of English that red is the basic color term for its spectrum).
It seems to me there is a broad range of "normal", as in well within the standard spec sheet tolerances for humans. It is more about what is average or median.
Same. There were like three different colors at first and then the remainder looked mostly the same.
Also, I wonder how the results are affected by my screen and environment. I’m on an iPhone in a dark room, with brightness turned all the way down and I currently have TrueTone enabled and Night Shift enabled.
I was bluer than x percent of the median. Night Shift mode reduces blue light exposure. At daytime with Night Shift off, I would surely be seeing the boundary earlier, as there would be more blue light transmitted by my screen.
I may have to repeat the attempt multiple times on different screens and lighting conditions (both indoors annd outside) and see if the results vary wildly or not. I think they will.
Who else tried with both eyes? A few years ago I had an implant to treat cataracts. It was notable at the time that the "new" eye was less yellow-tinted than the aged-in-place eye. I was told that the lens does yellow with age. Over time, my brain mostly adjusted, but on this test I did notice a subtle hue difference between eyes. Did anyone else try that experiment?
No. I got it set for distance vision. There are modern implants that are "multi-focal". But they work by spreading out the light, so everything is less bright at any distance. My two pieces of anecdata are: 1. A friend with multi-focal implants says that he needs a very bright light for reading now. Which is one of the reasons I avoided multi-focal. 2. My optometrist got multi-focal, and he noted that it required retraining his brain somewhat, because now instead of accommodation providing focus, focus requires mental attention to the subject of interest.
Cataract implant technology is moving very fast, and my data is about 5 years old, so YMMV.
Guy Deutscher’s “Through the Language Glass” is a very readable history of linguistic relativism, including the long history of this experiment. It even has some colour plates to illustrate. Recommended.
Yeah, as I was toggling "blue" / "green" / "blue" / "green" I had the distinct sensation that it might just show me that I was in a region where I couldn't even make a consistent distinction.
I think there's an anchoring effect in play here. If you select blue -> blue -> green -> blue -> green -> blue -> green…, you land at the population median.
(The point being that, once you get to a somewhat ambiguous point (after two blue selections), you can say "oh, well, compared to the last one this is {opposite color}!", and it seems most people do that.)
My boundary was hue 188, bluer than 98% of the population, for me turquoise is green and then it shows an overall chart which I have to agree with so no, I don't agree with your assessment. I often get into blue/green arguments with my children and that's when I started to suspect that it was personal opinion.
If I'm off on a detail like that, then...uh oh.
For this, you just lost The Game.
https://xkcd.com/391/
My wife and I go round and round about what is and isn't blue and/or green.
Whenever it's come up at home, my spouse simply insists "I don't need to know the difference between aqua, turquoise, and seafoam. They're all blue." At this point I just nod and agree, it's not worth the fight anymore. ;)
Speaking of, I'd be curious about a similar experiment but one that compares how grotesque, for lack of a better word, certain words sound. The word bleen makes me uncomfortable, I think because my brain automatically goes to spleen; grue isn't my favorite either but I prefer it to bleen.
I'm curious how universal that is though. Do others have similarly aligned preferences for one word over the other, or are our feelings about them more evenly spread?
I guess that makes sense thinking about it now since it's not a deep blue, and there's obviously no red component, but I never thought of it as being defined as equal parts blue and green.
(Turquoise I would consider to be blue-green/both).
I’m sure you’ve had conversations where that’s the answer you want to give.
A test that allows an answer of neither would deliver more information (transition points and an error bar) without failing to identify a distribution in the population taking the test.
Realistically there is a broad range that we all can acknowledge is neither, but is instead teal, and forcing a binary choice means people just choose randomly.
I think the test can be fairly criticised on the basis that it is assuming everyone's psychological colour space has a discrete boundary between blue and green, which clearly isn't the case for some people (like you), but it is for others (like me).
Once I figured it, I tried it 2 more times ... and got different results :) but the new results were consistent.
But it cannot do that without bias, since people always have the third choice to drop out when they don't like their choices. There is also another bias, which is people will just select some random option when they want to say something equivalent to "blue-green" but don't have the choice, then they get a result biased in that direction but what has actually happened is they have given up. This random choice might be culturally biased towards people's preferred color. I personally selected green when that occurred for me and then just sat on green hammering that. Oh, I'm more willing to say green than other people? Meaningless, I wouldn't have called those colors green in a conversation.
When presented in a forum people also have the choice of criticising the false dichotomy which is what you are experiencing here. The point of posting it here is to get this sort of feedback, so...
Black and white are different. You can get grey just from blending them.
For some people's language usage, blue and green are adjacent colors, and thus defining a point that divides them is perfectly fine.
For other people, these are not adjacent -- for some people, there's a single color (aqua? turquoise?) between them, and green and turquoise are adjacent colors, as are turquoise and blue, and it's reasonable to ask about a dividing point between those adjacent pairs.
For those who don't use language this way -- do you consider red and blue adjacent, or do you consider purple (violet?) a necessary intermediate? Are you comfortable defining a point between red and blue, or are you instead comfortable defining a point between red and purple, and a point between purple and blue?
And for all I know, there are people for whom blue and green (or blue and red) have a distance greater than one, or greater than two...
Russian speakers broadly consider sky blue / turquoise / cyan a distinct color right between green and blue
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...
Although the question "is the color distinct and basic or just a shade?" is very subjective. Is pink distinct or a shade of red/purple? Is purple distinct or a shade of red/blue? Is green distinct or a shade of blue? (it's well-known that in Japanese green separated from blue only relatively recently, with very bluish traffic lights and other quirks included)
I think there's another set of questions here -- why is "blue-green family" a thing in your mind, rather than "blue-yellow family"? Is there a "red-blue family"? "Orange-blue"?
Also, yellow-blue and red-green are opponents that can't be mixed because of how our retinas preprocess the signals from cones. Therefore, you obviously end up with blue-green (cyan), red-yellow (orange), yellow-green (lime) and blue-red (magenta, which actually doesn't exist on the light spectrum) families of related colors.
The analogous version in black and white is "is this dark grey or light grey?" because that's the one asking you to guess which side of the 50/50 split the color is on.
:/
We are usually not specific in our day-to-day language, and this exposes/clarifies the issue.
And you would get some number arguing how "several" is a distinct category in the same way this post has people talking about cyan.
If you're going to go with linguistic self-report and a single item, you really want something like an 11-point Likert scale. A smart design might get e.g. a person's rating of "blue-ness vs. green-ness" on an 11-point scale, then determine the optimal cutpoint via e.g. clustering, logistic regression, or some other method, to really get something meaningful.
IMO, growing up, unless you lived under a rock, it seems obvious to me that you will have experienced different people pointing at the same colour and uttering very different colour labels (pink vs. red, blue vs. green, black vs. deep blue/purple, etc) from the labels you might have applied yourself. Differing/shared colour perception isn't exactly a rare kind of topic (almost is like the canonical stoner topic, also common online), so I'd be a bit surprised if this demo is actually introducing anyone to this concept already. Any excitement is surely from other implications people think the demo has.
But unfortunately there are no interesting implications from what this site shows. Yes, it demonstrates the boring fact that: "it isn't clear how different people assign different color labels to the same physical stimuli" (and yes, this is FALSELY assuming that everyone's monitors/screens are the same too), but if you didn't already know this... I'm not sure exactly what social context you could have possibly grown up in.
* They refer to specific objects (a duck and a stone), eventually these referents can be transcended though, like with the case of orange. * Their frequency is roughly similar to each other (along with cyan, aqua, etc.), so there's no one term for this range (e.g. there's no doubt in a corpus of English that red is the basic color term for its spectrum).
Not really sure how to interpret this. Where is "normal" on the curve?
I think the intent here is clear in context.
Somewhat similar to a site I made a while ago, but for more "perception boundary" colors: https://theleo.zone/colorcontroversy/
Also, I wonder how the results are affected by my screen and environment. I’m on an iPhone in a dark room, with brightness turned all the way down and I currently have TrueTone enabled and Night Shift enabled.
I was bluer than x percent of the median. Night Shift mode reduces blue light exposure. At daytime with Night Shift off, I would surely be seeing the boundary earlier, as there would be more blue light transmitted by my screen.
I may have to repeat the attempt multiple times on different screens and lighting conditions (both indoors annd outside) and see if the results vary wildly or not. I think they will.
Cataract implant technology is moving very fast, and my data is about 5 years old, so YMMV.
Guy Deutscher’s “Through the Language Glass” is a very readable history of linguistic relativism, including the long history of this experiment. It even has some colour plates to illustrate. Recommended.
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/412264/through-the-language-...
ETA: But of course when I retook the test without my glasses, I went even greener.
It would be much funnier, and also more insightful, if it didn't do this and let you contradict yourself.
(The point being that, once you get to a somewhat ambiguous point (after two blue selections), you can say "oh, well, compared to the last one this is {opposite color}!", and it seems most people do that.)
For some, it might be blue -> blue -> blue -> blue -> green -> blue -> green -> blue.
> I wouldn't assume most people do that.
isn't turquoise exactly (50%) between the two?