If you’ve ever found yourself fighting over the last red sweet in the packet you’re not alone. The red ones are by far our favourites, scientists say – and it’s all down to how humans have evolved.

A study which investigated our confectionery preferences found we associate red with warmth, sweetness and ripeness, which makes the red sweets in a pack far more appealing than other colours.

Yellow sweets, meanwhile, are the most likely to be left lingering at the end of a pack.

They are eight times less popular than red sweets because the colour is associated with a sour flavour.

The Indian researchers based their study on sweets from US brand Life Savers, and asked more than 100 men and women to rank which colours they preferred.

Nearly half – 43 per cent – picked red as their top choice, while about one quarter, 26 per cent, opted for blue. Orange came in next with 15 per cent, while 10 per cent chose green and only 5 per cent preferred yellow.

The researchers, writing in the Open Science Framework, said red likely came top because of a phenomenon known as ‘perceptual fluency’ – the ease and speed with which the brain matches an image with our expectations.

This means red was more easily associated with sweetness than other colours.

Blue, meanwhile, triggers feelings of calmness and peace, according to the study.

‘Colours evoke specific emotions, and dictate the mood of consumers,’ the researchers said. ‘This gives the visual appeal of red a competitive advantage over other flavours.’