Interactive test finds where your blue-green boundary sits relative to the broader population.
Key Takeaways
The test works by presenting colors along the blue-green spectrum and asking you to classify each as blue or green.
Your cutoff point is then compared against population distribution, expressed as a percentile.
The binary blue/green framing excludes named intermediates like cyan, teal, and turquoise, which many users treat as distinct categories.
Color naming is culturally shaped: orange only entered most European languages in the 1500s, and Japanese traffic conventions still call certain green lights “blue.”
Hacker News Comment Review
Strong consensus that the forced binary choice (blue vs. green) is the main methodological flaw: commenters with clearly teal or cyan perception had no accurate option, skewing their reported boundary.
Several commenters flagged an anchoring effect in the test sequence: once colors become ambiguous, participants tend to alternate choices relative to the previous screen rather than absolute perception, pulling results toward the population median.
The Japan traffic light example surfaced as a sharp real-world case where cultural convention overrides perceptual naming, reinforcing that the test measures label boundaries, not raw perception.
Notable Comments
@smokedetector1: Personal field test confirmed his blue-green boundary is greener than 95% of the population after a street dispute over a house color.
@seemaze: Binary framing analogy – asking whether Denver is in Canada or Mexico – captures the false-dichotomy problem sharply.
@naishoya: Japanese youth raised on LED lights now accept “blue” as the conventional label for what older generations perceived and named differently.
