For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about how our perception of colors (sometimes) transcends cultural boundaries.
During the 1970s researchers from the Summer Institute of Linguistics carried stacks of paint chip cards manufactured by the Munsell company to remote areas around the world to show them to native speakers of dozens of little-studied, non-written languages. Thousands of times a ritual was repeated: over the course of an hour or two the participants were shown more than 300 cards, each with a sample mounted in the center of a neutral background, as they were asked the local-language approximation of the question, “What color is this?”
The results — the responses of more than 2,500 speakers from 110 languages categorizing 360 precisely graduated color samples — were duly coded by the field workers and sent back to Berkeley, where Brent Berlin, Paul Kay and Richard Cook oversaw their initial analysis as the World Color Survey. The initial findings from the survey, published in 2009, advanced and refined Berlin and Kay’s 1969 theory that human cultures’ basic color terms expand in a predictable pattern.