While watching the weather today I noticed all the green means "light weather" while the red stuff is more severe.. This got me thinking about how we always associate green with "good, go, success, positive, ect" and red is just the opposite. Same thing with traffic lights! Does anyone know why this is?
Thanks!
The colour associations come from shipping. If you're the captain of a commercial ship, in daylight, and you encounter another ship that needs to cross you path but it going roughly the same direction as you (i.e. not the opposite direction), it is easy to see what's going on and yield to the boat to your right.
However, at night, its not that easy to discern which way a ship is going so a system was devised whereby the lights along the left side of the boat are red, and the lights along the right side of the boat are green. If you see green lights, it indicates the boat is going the other way so you can continue. If you see red lights, its going the same way so you yield.
This convention was transposed to roads when it became apparent that some form of traffic control would be necessary.
I recommend posing this question to the sociologists and psychologists in r/AskSocialScience as they can most likely help you more with this.