Nouns or verbs?

Have a look at these three images and choose which two you think best ‘go together’.
Done that? Good. Chances are you chose the hen and the cow. And if you had to explain your reasoning, you’d say they were both animals.  Correct.

But, of course, that’s not the only way to do it. Some of you may have grouped the cow and the grass. Your explanation would state that cows eat grass. Correct. But is it equally correct?

According to some authorities the hen/cow coupling is superior to the cow/grass coupling.  Why? Because the attributes of the two have been identified (animals). Whereas the cow/grass link is only down to observation. There’s been no abstraction.

That’s what I learned over 20 years ago when I took the 3 day Instrumental Enrichment course in thinking skills.

More recently, I’ve discovered that this is a particularly cultural interpretation of intelligence.
In a wonderful book The Geography of Thought author Richard E. Nisbett shows how Westerners and Easterners think differently in a number of ways. In a series of experiments, Westerners did indeed couple the hen and cow, while Easterners the cow and grass.

This didn’t represent different levels of thinking at all. It showed that Westerners tended to think in nouns and Easterners in verbs. Or as he put it:
“American children preferred to group objects because they belonged to the ‘taxonomic’ category.” While “Chinese children preferred to group objects on the basis of relationships”.

Reference:
Feuerstein, R., Rand, Y., Hoffman, M., and Miller, R. (1980). The Instrumental
Enrichment. Baltimore, MD: University Park Press.
Richard E Nisbett, 2003, The Geography of Thought, Nicholas Brealey