Of course, elsewhere in the world black means no such thing. Wikipedia tells me that : in the Japanese culture, Black is associated with honor(rather than death)

(Urban dwellers: Try walking around your block when there’s a blackout sometime, with no streetlights or anything. It’s surprising how quickly those primal instincts kick in, telling you to get to a safe place ASAP.)

It’s clearly not about cleanliness. In some cultures, accrued, “earned” dirt is a good thing—the reason “black belt” is the top rank is that everyone originally started with a white belt…one who had worked at it hard and long enough eventually turned their belt black with soot/dirt.

And white moves first in chess for absolutely racial reasons.

I agree with Howie’s statement. If you even say anything in relation to black or white, it’s automatically tied in with race because the extremely politically correct make it that way and look for the offensive where it may not exist.

Interestingly, most of the Western biblical use of the white/day black/night themes in stories are used to malign occult, “black magic”, approaches, and favor more devotional religious spirituality (if you read between the lines in parables like the one where Noah gets drunk, for example).

The racial connotations of black/white were applied after the fact by racists, usually in America during slavery (for example, in Mormonism). And it’s an ill-fitting mashup to say the least…

And I agree with the light-dark theory. But that’s not to say that the dirty-clean explanation doesn’t play a part.

The Stroop test is not just a test of deeply embedded beliefs from our evolutionary past, but also the embedded beliefs we have developed within the course of our own lives. And so even though we only have begun bathing daily within the last 100 years, it’s likely the participants (my guess would be 18 year old undergraduate students) have been bathing regularly all their lives.

Also, they found a stronger link between these positive associations with white in people who rated higher on cleanliness, so this theory is based on the data.

It is classic conditioning based on Western culture to associate white with purity and black with impurity. Non-western or indigenous cultures do not necessarily have the same tendencies.

To extrapolate the contemporary results to an ancient preoccupation with dirt is ridiculous. Humans only began bathing daily in the last 100 years. Ancient humans had a completely different understanding of the world, and would certainly have different cultural color associations.

Darkness is unknown and scary. Especially back before electric lights were everywhere, not being able to see anything at night, not even a few feet in front of you… It’s scary! Bad emotions.

Whereas light lets you see things, it helps you have control over your surroundings and know where you’re about to step, it’s comforting. Good emotions.