My first thought to that question was: "All but the hen have 4 legs, the hen only has 2". I'd have gotten the right answer, but only serendipitously.

That was my first thought as well. They're also the only ones without hooves. What does that make us?

If you count the average number of legs on a bird, you will find that your result was not so serendipitous.

> I would say that if you truly can't come up with the answer to that question that they "want" (barring any possible cultural reasons for not being able to do so), your intuition for pattern recognition could probably use some work.

So it measures how good you are at blending in with other people, while being the entrance exam for a society of people claiming to be vastly different than other people. Hmm.

The ability to answer those kinds of ambiguous questions is extremely culturally linked. The whole idea about IQ tests is that they're supposed to be universal and culturally independent. The Cow/hen/pig/sheep question is clearly not culturally independent - what's important about those animals is a cultural question.

I don't think this question is a good example of being culturally linked. Rather it asks for knowledge about the world you live in. What characteristic of an animal do you think is most important?

- that it's koscher? (very cultural) - the number of characters in its name? - whether it is born out of an egg or womb (e.g. mammal or not)?

If you seriously can't figure this out I have to doubt your intelligence - however I wouldn't say that about all test examples.

Do you really believe that which characteristic is important about an animal is not a cultural question? If it seems "obvious" that's because your culture is invisible from the inside.

http://www.zompist.com/amercult.html

Sorry, but this is BS. First of all I'm European and my wife is Japanese. Asked her - same answer.

Second of all - just try some mind trick where you go outside yourself and try to observe something objectively, say as an 'Alien' who visits Earth for the first time. Which of the listed characteristics of a hen vs. a cow is important to you?

> I would guess that your ability to correctly answer an "ambiguous" question like that measures your ability to effectively communicate with other humans

So it measures how good you are at not thinking outside of the box? ;)

Exactly.

But I would say that "thinking inside of the box" is actually an incredibly important skill in practical situations. Probably 99+% of any functioning adult's thinking is "inside-the-box" (I realize that this is sort of a nebulous/meaningless statement, sorry). Things that we don't even think about, like looking both ways before crossing the street or watching our step as we get off the bus are all examples of inside-the-box thinking. But maybe a more interesting example of inside-the-box thinking (in the context of something you might want to actually test) is communicating effectively with other humans of a similar cultural background to your own.

So to get back to the portion of the article I quoted and maybe refine my point a bit, maybe it really isn't fair to say that any answer to questions like the farm animal one is more "natural" than another, but rather only seems more natural due to the biases of our own mental models that our evolution has optimized for survival rather than to achieve any measure of fundamental truth or purity. That's perfectly okay to me, as long as the test makes no claim to measure intelligence in any "fundamental" sense, but rather in a particular sense of intelligence that arises only as a human being living on earth. It's entirely a matter of opinion whether such a sense of intelligence is of any interest or relevance, though. Personally I think it is.

Perhaps the best way to put it is that this kind of question measures an ability to discern the edges of the box.

I agree. I am just not sure what task this is particularly useful for- from experience, it is really, really good for "feeling what an exam is probably about and acing it without studying much" :)

I prefer to describe it to people as thinking the box, knowing the contents, and being willing keep it neat and tidy inside.

Not so much thinking inside or outside "the" box, but being able to think inside somebody else's.

I would put it as measuring one's ability to determine the most salient category from the perspective of the person asking the question. In the case of the farm animal question, the context of the question implies the criteria that should be used to determine which is different.