It's all about the berries

One more from the annals of "identifying possible biological gender differences and coming up with bullshit evo-psych explanations for them": women like pink... er, slightly redder blues.

Let me first express how impressed I am that someone (whether the reporter or the writer of the press release, I don't know) took the finding that women apparently prefer slightly redder blues than men, and declared that:

more women than men really do prefer pink — or at least a redder shade of blue

Because if you've done a study about colour preferences and gender, you've just gotta get pink in there somewhere, right?

But it's the explanation for this apparent difference in preference that just kills me -- women must prefer reddish blue because of all those bright red berries they had to gather 'way back in the mists of time.

Of course, if it turned out men's preferences were on the red end of the spectrum, we'd be talking about how men evolved to like the red blood of the animals they hunted or something. But since it's women, it must be all about the berries -- oh, and "healthy, reddish faces".

Why this preference (so far evident in only the one study, as far as I can tell) has to be explained through evo-psych, I don't know. Couldn't it just be a slight difference in visual processing? Or something culturally influenced (sure, they tested a "small group" of Chinese people, but that's hardly conclusive)?

ETA: And Bad Science reveals that the results for the Chinese population were... not similar at all. The absurdity! It grows!