From the archive: a colourful personality test, 1970
TheObserver Magazine of 8 March 1970 had a bit of fun with a colour test developed by the psychologist Dr Max Lüscher that supposedly revealed personality and character traits (‘Showing your true colours’), despite his stern warning that ‘it is not a parlour game or a horoscope’.
Robert Shields, the Observer’s psychology correspondent, assessed the test and presented a simplified version to try out for yourself. There were eight coloured cards to rank in order of preference. Mine were violet, red, dark blue, green, brown, black, yellow, and grey. I was delighted to find that violet is ‘popular among pre-adolescents, emotionally immature adults and homosexuals’ and showed one’s modus operandi, but the second choice shows what one’s objective really is – for red, ‘excitability, sexual desire, the will to win and the urge to dominate others’. Nailed it.
Red stands for ‘revolution, anger (“I saw red”) and violence’, blue ‘has the effect of calming people down’ (‘in a blue room, a person’s blood pressure falls slightly’) but ‘most colours do not have so easily measurable an effect’. Weirdly, he considered these to be universal, despite the obvious cultural biases. ‘There is some mystery surrounding the widespread dislike of green,’ he averred, ‘which in some countries is associated with envy or greed.’
The test was put to six well-known people of the time. The first two choices of Mary Whitehouse, of the Viewers and Listeners Association, were yellow and red. ‘May try to spread her activities over too wide a field,’ concluded Lüscher, but she disagreed. ‘I don’t think I’m overstretched, you know. In the summer I do very little at all.’ If only she’d done even less.
Unfortunately for Peter Cadbury – first choice, blue – the ‘day after we visited him at his Westward TV offices he was fired by his fellow directors’. At least his blood pressure would have been lower than it otherwise might have been.