The Paint-Chart Test

Was the paint-chart test useful or not useful? Why?

In general, the paint-chart test did show that males and females do indeed use a different lexicon in the description of colours. At the same time however, there were also similarities or a lack of differences in certain aspects of the descriptions by both parties.

Firstly, there were more females that simply attributed another colour to the colour they were supposed to describe, eg. "magenta", rosy-hued", etc. On the other hand, more males tended to use actual objects in their descriptions of colours - for instance, 'blood' for red, 'tarzan's underwear' for olive green, 'Nic Yun' for pink, etc. on the male side as compared to the solitary 'the same colour as my hairband' on the female side.

Such differences indicated that the females were more conservative and did not dare to utilize other things and entities (other than other colours) to describe the colours. Males, on the contrary, leveraged on tangible objects in their descriptions. At the same time, most of their responses had rather outrageous content, indicating their impulsiveness but also their creativity and ability to think beyond the box.

A similarity in the responses of both parties was that there was a noticeable lack of personal pronouns in the description except for the solitary 'the same colour as my hairband' response on the female side. In addition, both sides tend to give rather brief responses of one word or just a short phrase.

Such similarities show that the test was rather impersonal and participants were unwilling to divulge fully their real feelings - hence the lack of personal pronouns and brief responses. In my opinion, I feel that this is because the responses were publicly displayed, and thus, most people had a tendency to hold back a little when responding to the stimulus given, i.e. colour.

However, in light of such a situation, with the males still having more outrageous and attention-grabbing responses as compared to the females' conservative responses, we can still detect some subtle gender differences - that males tended to be more impulsive while females more subdued.

In short, the test is not useful in that it does not allow anonymity in the responses which would affect results. Yet, it still unearths some gender differences between male and females. As such, it is still useful to a relatively large extent.

Eugene, Nic Yun, Vionna, Sabrina, Ivan