Does the Average Color Influence Selection?

The Goldilocks effect is the tendency to select the middle choice when three choices that can be expressed in three levels, such as size and price, are presented. We investigate the possibility that the Goldilocks effect can also be applied to color and that it unintentionally distorts the choice. Specifically, we hypothesized that when presented with three choices consisting of two different colors and their average color (the average of the two colors), people would choose the average color, and we conducted a crowdsourcing experiment. The experiment results showed that people did not tend to choose the average color option. However, analysis by gender showed that females tended to select the average color option while males did not. In addition, when the average colors were similar to one of the two colors in the three options, both males and females tended to select the less similar different color option.