- Let's say I give you a graph
and it has two bars on the graph:
a yellow bar and a blue bar.
And I tell you, "One of these bars represents
"how many bananas were sold in a store,
"and the other bar represents how many blueberries
were sold in the store."
Which bar do you think was for bananas
and which was for blueberries?
Probably the yellow one's for bananas
and blue is for blueberries.
That's a pretty obvious case,
where the particular colors we use can communicate meaning.
And if we had used a red bar and a green bar,
that would've been more confusing,
'cause we're talking about bananas that are yellow
and blueberries that are blue.
But now let's think about, say, a weather map,
where we're representing the amount of wind
in different cities.
So which colors should we use?
It turns out, the colors do matter in that case too.
Because people have these expectations
about what colors will mean.
- Y'know, we believe, at least in our lab,
that this applies for even more abstract things, right?
Things like justice, right,
which doesn't really have a color.
Or, y'know, happiness.
And so what we're really trying to understand
is how people come to have associations
between kind of anything and colors,
and how we might be able to describe those relationships.