Quick - what color comes to mind? If you're American or from a Western culture, you're likely thinking green right now. But if you're Chinese or African, Good Luck comes in red and you don't really have a color for Jealousy or Nature.
What am I talking about? The graphic below by David McCandles is a cultural color wheel - a depiction of how various cultures associate color with different concepts.
I found two things interesting - first, it seems that we Westerners associate color with just about everything. 54 of the 84 listed concepts have a color assigned to it in our culture. The culture with the next highest color association? The Japanese with 50. The Hindu culture, which appears to be far more colorful in everyday life (have you ever seen a Bollywood movie?) than either the Western or the Japanese, comes in a distant 3rd with only 30.
The second thing I found interesting - who do you think we overlap with most often, from a color/concept perspective? Once again, it's the Japanese - we connect on 21 different points. The next closest culture is the Eastern European with 8 match ups. I'm not really sure what this means - are the American/Western and Japanese cultures really that similar?
from Information is Beautiful
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