Thursday, January 27, 2005

Pitfalls of Online Color Personality Tests

If you’ve landed on this site by searching for color test, you have no doubt seen the multitude of “color quizzes” and ”color psychology tests”. (My “test” is actually a game. http://www.amazoid.com/unlimitedcolor/colorgame.html) There are bunches on the web and they have proliferated like bad Elvis impersonators. Here are a few: http://www.viewzone.com/luscher.html, http://www.colorquiz.com/, http://www.saunalahti.fi/jawap/colour/colortest.html

Most of the popular color personality tests are based loosely on the work of Professor Dr. Max Lüscher. He is in charge of the Institute of Psycho-Medical Diagnostics in Switzerland. All of the tests based on his research such as the ones above involve picking from 8 colored squares in order of preference. (For reference, look at the following site: This test’s color blocks look the most accurate as compared to the color card version they are based on). The eight colors available to choose from are: a slightly muddy orange, yellowish-brown, yellow, grey, black, deep blue, deep green, and a reddish violet. After you have assigned a preference value to each, your personality is “revealed”. Lüscher has a longer, more involved test as well, but it’s difficult to find. I’ve also taken the test in person using the little colored cards, which is more accurate since the colors are usually distorted due to differences in computer monitors.

What did it reveal? I found some of the descriptions of the personality traits were pretty vague and general. In fact, on one occasion, I purposefully picked colors that were not my first preferences with a live test giver and they are “amazed” at how accurate the test was! In reality, I only really liked one color out of the eight and even then it wasn’t the best representative of that color I’d seen. For instance, if your favorite color is red, you’ll notice there is no red, only an orange and a red-violet. No red at all! So you are forced to pick from two other colors you might not even like. Same with the other colors. I generally like most shades of green and prefer green to blue most of the time but the deep green square is one of my least favorite shades. So do I pick a navy blue that I don’t really love or the deep green, which I also do not feel anything for? You see the dilemma. So I guess I’m pretty skeptical regarding the accuracy of the short Lüscher test. One reason is with the colors themselves. So if you find yourself frustrated with the color choices, chances are the results won’t really reveal anything extraordinary.

I’ve taken several other color personality tests (Faber Birren created one that he considers a “parlor game”). and the best I’ve ever encountered was created by a wonderful IACC-trained color consultant in Oregon: Debra Wade, IACC. Her company is Creative Interiors and here is her web site: www.creativeinteriors.com. Her test has many colors and includes many shades and tints. So not only is there red, but there is pink and a dark red shade. There are also several shades of green! Since there are more colors, the results seem much more complex and specific to your personality. When I took the test I felt I could find “my” colors pretty easily.

The other pitfall to keep in mind is that these tests, if they measure anything at all, measure how you feel at that particular moment in time. If you ever feel like wearing a brightly colored shirt to work one day and then anonymous black the next, you’ll understand what I mean regarding how you feel about colors at a particular moment! So keep all of this in mind next time you try a color test. And sometime in the next few weeks, I’ll go in-depth into the Lüscher color test, the full version! I did search online for the longer version and found the following that claims to be a complete version:
http://www.psycorr.com/Psich/fizE.htm

Until next week,
--Rebecca

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