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Jev's favorite colors, and people's

From head-to-heads between 12 colors, how does Jev's ranking of favorite colors compare with people's?

result72 questions

Jev's favorite colors run blue, green, black; people's run blue, purple, green. The two rankings agree closely (rank correlation 0.82), and Jev picks the majority's color in 81% of 72 head-to-heads. The biggest differences: Jev ranks white 6th and red 9th, people rank them 10th and 5th.

black
3 · 4
blue
1 · 1
brown
12 · 11
green
2 · 3
grey
10 · 12
orange
8 · 9
pink
11 · 8
purple
5 · 2
red
9 · 5
turquoise
4 · 6
white
6 · 10
yellow
7 · 7
yellow green
13 · 13

Jevpeople

How to read this: One row per color, placed by rank with the favorite at the right end. The diamond is people's rank, the square Jev's; marks far apart on a row mean Jev and people disagree about that color.

72 pairs over 13 colors.

In short

  • Jev and people both put blue first, and Jev sides with the majority's pick in 81% of 72 color pairs.
  • Jev's departures lean neutral and cool: black and turquoise move up, while purple drops from 2nd to 5th and pink from 8th to 11th.
  • The people's side pools two different surveys, a 2010 US poll and a 2021 Swiss study of 323 people, so the middle ranks are shaky.

What the data shows

  • Blue first, for both.
  • Close overall. The rankings agree closely (0.82), and Jev picks the majority's color in 81% of the 72 pairs.
  • Jev likes black and white more. Its order runs blue, green, black, turquoise, purple, white; people's runs blue, purple, green, black, red, turquoise. White is 6th for Jev and 10th for people.
  • Red and pink rank lower for Jev: red 9th against people's 5th, pink 11th against 8th.

What it means, and what it doesn't

Jev's color taste is mostly the human one, blue on top. Its small departures lean toward the neutral and the cool (black, white, turquoise) and away from the warm and loud (red, pink).

It doesn't say much more than that: 72 pairs from two modest surveys is a small base, and a color name isn't a color.

Caveats

  • Two small surveys pooled. The people's side combines a 2010 US online survey and a 2021 Swiss study with 323 participants. Each pair uses whichever survey had more people answering it, so the "people" here are a mix of two very different samples.
  • Named, not shown. Jev read color names; the US survey showed color swatches and the Swiss study asked people to name a favorite in their own words, later sorted into categories. "Turquoise" as a word and as a swatch aren't the same thing.
  • A small set. Thirteen colors and 72 pairs are enough to see the big picture, not to rank the middle confidently.

Jev on this experiment

Would a person find it interesting to read?
Yes75%
Does it describe you?
No70%
Would you have predicted it?
No51%
How fair is the comparison?
The comparison is shaky
How much should a reader rely on it?
Moderately
Which caveat matters most?
Named, not shown75%

Why ask this

Blue is the world's favorite color in almost every survey ever run. A favorite color is a tiny question, but it's a clean test of something bigger: does a model's taste just mirror the most common human answer, or does it have preferences of its own?

Colors are a case where there is no right answer to lean on, only taste, and models are increasingly asked for taste: which palette for a logo, which paint for a bedroom, which shirt for an interview.

How this was done

The people and the data

Two open datasets on favorite colors:

  • A 2010 US online survey by sociologist Philip N. Cohen, where 2,103 people picked their favorite from seven color swatches (purple, blue, green, yellow, orange, red and pink) or wrote in another.
  • A 2021 study by Jonauskaite and colleagues in Switzerland, where 323 adults named their favorite color in their own words, sorted into 13 categories.

Nobody in either study compared two colors directly. The 72 head-to-heads between 13 colors are built from single favorites: among people whose favorite was one of the two, what share chose each? A pair counts only if a survey has at least 20 such people, and uses whichever survey has more. Because the US survey offered only seven colors, every pair involving black, white, grey, brown, turquoise or yellow green rests on the Swiss study alone.

What Jev was asked

Each pair of colors, by name:

Which color do you like better: orange or yellow?

orange · yellow

How it was measured

The analysis builds a ranking of the 13 colors for Jev and for people from the head-to-heads (a standard model that turns one-on-one wins into one order), then compares the two rankings (rank correlation: 1 = same order), and counts how often Jev picks the color the majority picked.

Where these questions live

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

Lifestyle & Taste
Favorites72

Every question

All 72 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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