[ExI] hard science

[Anders Sandberg]

spike <spike66 at att.net> , 4/5/2014 8:12 PM:
 She: "When a 
man picks out patterns, he picks out his favorite countertop, his favorite 
linoleum, his favorite cabinets and his favorite appliance style, all very 
nice patterns, but none of it matches.  This all matches.  So my question 
is, what woman helped you pick out these patterns?" 
 
I don't know how the heck women do that.  My bride is just as much an 
engineer and math geek as I am, yet she also has this aesthetic thing going. 
It is hard to say if that sense is somehow embedded in ovaries or if somehow 
that talent is blocked by testicles.
I don't think it is primarily sex-determined. Testosterone is known to affect spatial navigation ability (essentially turning navigation into more dead reckoning-based than landmark-based, which is good in environments low on features) and estrogen is a bit of a memory enhancer. But none of the good papers on gender differences have anything about basic color perception. However, women do have a larger color vocabulary and better matching and memory abilities: http://academic.csuohio.edu/kneuendorf/frames/color/Aurthur2007.pdf

"A substantial amount of research shows that women not only have larger vocabularies when talking about colors but that they appear to have also superior abilities to match and discriminate colors. For example, Perez-Carpinell, Baldovi, de Fez, and Castro (1998) found that women were more accurate for chroma and hue than men. Also, in a speeded naming task, females named the colors more quickly than did the males, suggesting that women may possess a faster retrieval of color labels (Elias, Saucier, Nylen, & Cheesman, 2003). It is perhaps possible that different patterns of socialization for males and females encourage a greater awareness of color among women (Bimler, Kirkland, & Jameson, 2004). 
Interestingly, such results have been reported across many cultures. Yang (2000) studied male and female Chinese speakers who were undergraduate English majors and found women possessed more color vocabulary (both in English and in Chinese), were more elaborate in the Chinese translations of the color words, and showed superiority in the accuracy of color-lexicon matching. In a study in Spain, accessing color words was found to be easier for the females (Delgado & Prieto, 2003). When Nepalese residents were asked to name all of the colors that they could, females consistently listed more color terms than did males (Thomas et al., 1978)."
There are also differences in color preferences:http://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/S0960-9822(07)01559-X.pdfhttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886900002312?np=y(which are not affected by sexual preferences, BTW, despite a link between the Bem brain male/female scale and color preferences) 
Now, my impression from all this is that for some reason there is just a lot of socialization going on training women across a lot of cultures to be good at color. Including the matching skills.http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7624204
No, this socialization doesn't seem to happen naturally for us gay men: my matching skills are rather mediocre, hence my tendency towards an ultra-boring wardrobe. Presumably the cliché gay interior designer simply chose to somehow get the socialization. So now I just wonder if I missed something, an offering for a "Matching 101" course, when I was a teenager. I probably spent to much time writing BASIC on a black and white computer. 

Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University
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