Favorite Colors

Materials:

• 10 boy participants
• 10 girl participants
• 10 index cards
• Crayons
• Pen
• Notebook.

Procedure:

1. You'll need to start off by creating your testing materials. First, find take out these ten colored crayons: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, brown, black, pink, white.
2. Color each white index card with one of the crayons. You don't have to color the whole card -- just enough to adequately show off the color. Resist creating any designs. The simpler, the better.
3. Think about the question of this project: do you think being a boy or a girl will make a difference with favorite colors?
4. Write down your best guess, often called a hypothesis, in your notebook.
5. Test your first volunteer by displaying all ten index cards. Ask the volunteer to select one favorite color.
6. Record this in your notebook.
7. Repeat this test with your remaining 19 volunteers. Make sure you test each volunteer one at a time. You don't want any of the other volunteers being influenced by a friend's favorite color.
8. When you're done, take a look at your notes. Create ten separate columns for each color.
9. Make tally marks for the boys under the appropriate color column. For example, if two boys picked the color orange as their favorite color, place two tally marks in the orange column.
10. Which column has the most tally marks? Did boys pick different favorite colors than girls?

Results:

Experiments that test what volunteers like best will always depend on the volunteers. You might have noticed that blue was very popular among both genders, but that boys seemed to favor green while girls favored purple and pink.

Why?

While color preference may have some links to gender, those links haven't been proven. The truth is that all people are unique. All boys will never have the same favorite color, and neither will all girls. The trickier truth is that society does influence what a person's favorite color could be. Have you ever seen a baby announcement card for a girl? Typically, those announcements are pink, but baby boy announcements are usually blue. This kind of influence sometimes can make boys think they don't like pink -- because it's a "girly" color -- and prefer darker shades instead.

You want to know something interesting, though? The most common favorite color in the world is actually blue. Did you find that result in your test? Whether you got that result or not, science is a never-ending search for answers...and you just added yours. Keep guessing and testing new ways to explore color preference. You can try testing a larger group of volunteers (what would happen if you tested 50 people instead of 20?) or ask volunteers to select their favorite shade of blue. Don't let the exploration stop here!