Author: Daniël Lakens

Although it is generally accepted that colors carry meaning, experimental research about individual, situational and cultural differences in the meaning of colors is scarce. Many countries have national colors that are used to represent the nation, such as when sport teams dress in the colors of their nation during international competitions to indicate their country of origin. Although probably all people in The Netherlands know that orange is the Dutch national color, the current research investigated whether orange is also psychologically meaningful for the Dutch. It turns out that the more people identify with The Netherlands, the more they like the color orange. 

When people talk about two different things, they often hold their hands apart. By doing so, they use concrete space to represent the differences between two concepts. In a paper recently accepted for publication in Psychological Science, participants performed a categorization task by pressing response keys located close together, or further apart. Especially when task was difficult, people were better able to perform correct categorizations when they could use the spatial distance between the response keys to tell things apart.

Authors: Daniël Lakens, Iris Schneider, Nils Jostmann, Thomas Schubert