Whose colors of feelings does Jev have?

Color-emotion associations differ a little by country. Of 31 countries, whose associations do Jev's color picks resemble most?

result20 questions

Jev's colors of feelings are closest to people's in the United Kingdom, the United States and the Netherlands, and furthest from Azerbaijan's (similarity 0.36 vs 0.27). But countries differ little: 17 of 31 are within the leader's margin of error. Asked what "most people" would say, Jev is also closest to the United Kingdom.

United Kingdom0.36

United States0.36

Netherlands0.35

France0.35

India0.35

Austria0.34

Germany0.34

Switzerland0.34

Sweden0.33

Norway0.33

… Greece0.29

… Nigeria0.29

… Ukraine0.28

… Cyprus0.28

… Azerbaijan0.27

How to read this: Countries ranked by how similar their color-feeling answers are to Jev's, top ten and bottom five. The bars are close in length because the differences between countries are small.

31 countries x 20 emotions; 90% intervals over emotions.

In short

Jev's links between colors and feelings look most like those of people in the United Kingdom, the United States and the Netherlands.
The lean is slight, since 17 of the 31 countries cannot be told apart from the United Kingdom at the top.
Jev answered in English and the country samples are uneven, so the ranking hints at an English tilt rather than proving one.

What the data shows

Star Wars Yoda meme: Closest to Jev's colors of feelings, the United Kingdom is. By a hair, it is. — Closest to Jev's colors of feelings, the United Kingdom is. By a hair, it is.

Top three: the United Kingdom (0.36), the United States (0.36) and the Netherlands (0.35), followed by France, India and Austria.
Bottom: Azerbaijan (0.27), Cyprus, Ukraine, Nigeria and Greece.
The spread is small: 17 of the 31 countries fall within the United Kingdom's margin of error.
Its picture of "most people" is also closest to the United Kingdom.

What it means, and what it doesn't

There's a lean, and it points where you'd expect if most of a model's reading is in English: toward the UK and the US, and away from Azerbaijan, Cyprus, Ukraine, Nigeria and Greece. But it's a lean, not a national identity: most countries are statistically tied.

The survey's country samples are uneven and not nationally representative, and Jev answered in English. For the overall comparison with everyone, see "The colors of feelings: Jev vs 7,387 people".

Caveats

Small differences. Countries mostly agree on colors and feelings, so the gaps between them are small. The top of the list is suggestive, not a clear ranking: more than half the countries can't be told apart from the leader.
Uneven country samples. Some countries have several hundred participants, others under a hundred, and none is a national sample.
One pick versus many. People ticked any number of feelings per color; Jev picked one color per feeling. The similarity compares a sharp answer with a spread-out one, which keeps every score low.
English prompts. Jev answered in English, which may pull it toward English-speaking countries regardless of anything else.

Jev on this experiment

Would a person find it interesting to read?: Yes73%
Does it describe you?: No61%
Would you have predicted it?: No52%
How fair is the comparison?: The comparison is shaky
How much should a reader rely on it?: A little
Which caveat matters most?: Small differences56%

Why ask this

Most color-feeling links are shared worldwide, but the details differ from country to country. Which country's details a model reproduces is a small test of whose culture its defaults come from.

Text on the internet is heavily English, so a model's associations might lean English-speaking even for something as basic as the color of relief. That lean would show up quietly in design advice, marketing copy or a story set in another country, where the "obvious" color for grief or love isn't the local one.

How this was done

The people and the data

The same survey as "The colors of feelings: Jev vs 7,387 people" (the International Colour-Emotion Association Survey, Jonauskaite and colleagues, 2020, CC BY), broken down by where participants came from: 31 countries, with 70 to 700 people each. For each of 20 feelings, every country has its own shares of how often the feeling was linked to each of 12 color terms. The participants were volunteers, not national samples.

What Jev was asked

No new questions: this reuses Jev's answers to the 20 questions "Which color do you associate most with the feeling ...?" from the colors-of-feelings experiment, and compares them with each country's answers.

How it was measured

For each country and each feeling, how similar Jev's colors are to that country's (a similarity score from 0 to 1, where 1 means identical shares), averaged over the 20 feelings. The analysis also estimates how much each country's score could move by chance (a 90% interval) to see which differences are real.

Where these questions live

20 questions across 1 topic of the map. Each opens on the map with every question in it.

Emotion

Colors of Emotions20

Every question

All 20 questions behind this result, the telling ones first: the examples the analysis points to, then the ones where Jev misses, biggest gap first.

Jev’s own answer

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