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Thoughts revolving around the use of colour have been plonking into what some laughably call my brain for the last week or so.
There is a State election coming up in South Australia in a few week’s time (March 18th) and the political parties have been plastering their A2-sized colour posters up on as many telegraph poles as they can.
Each party, of course, has its own colour scheme, so that you can instantly see who they are promoting by the colour; Red is ‘Labor‘, Blue is ‘Liberal‘ (or ‘Conservative’ for the British); Yellow is the ‘Democrats‘ (a party so highly skilled in shooting itself in the foot that I have more toes than they have members in Parliament), and Green is, surprisingly, for the ‘Greens‘ [Wikipedia on the 'Greens'], the tree-hugging, hair-socks and sandles brigade who have done marvels with turning Australia into a more environmentally-aware country.
What I find fascinating with all of this is what the present Labor party is doing to these ‘cast in stone’ Party colours. Capitalising on the ‘celebrity’ principle of association by showing photographs of each potential Labor candidate standing alongside the current Labor Premier, both gazing statesmanlike off into the distance. And the background colour to these photos of Labor worthies? Dark blue, a blue only a few shades darker than the Liberal blue.
Now, there is a long history of evidence to show that colour association is important to us; that we use the shorthand of colour to reduce our cognitive load and ‘recognise’ an object. So when an entity deliberately changes its colour scheme, without notice, and goes into competition for cognitive space with its direct competitor using the same colour, there is a tremendous potential for confusion and judgemental error.
I am watching with interest how the new colour scheme interferes with the voting process, if at all.
Technorati: south australia election, politics
