The Bouba Kiki effect

The dark side of psychology is often illuminated by sporadic playful beams. Today we are going to propose to you a small experiment, of course, innocuous; for which we are going to request the collaboration of all the readers.

It is not necessary to really strive; just observe and decide based on a premise. Do you see the image that heads the article? They are two abstract figures without any concrete meaning. The experiment consists in assigning a name to each of them. I am afraid that this exercise there is no space for creativity. I am going to give you two names and you, privately, must decide which name corresponds to each figure.

Which of these figures is Bouba and which is Kiki?

We give them a few seconds to baptize the images with their corresponding names. Remember, there is no right or wrong answer.

Enough? Well, what you have just done is a very brief linguistic-cognitive experiment called the Bouba / Kiki effect, created by the psychologist Wolfgang Köhler in 1929.

This scientist discovered that 95% of the subjects who participated in the experiment assigned the image of the right the name Bouba, and Kiki to the one on the left, although Köhler used the names Baluba and Takete.

That first exercise was carried out in Tenerife, but it was reproduced in many countries, changing slightly the physiognomy of the names; for example, Baluba was also called Bouba and Maluma in experiments performed by the neurologist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Edward Hubbard, and Takete was renamed Kiki.

Apparently, the experiments done with English speakers showed an even higher percentage than those practiced with Spanish-speaking people. 98% of the subjects investigated assigned the name Bouba to the rounded shape, and Kiki to the pointy. The conclusion of the experiment suggests that the human brain constructs abstract properties of forms; assigning sharp sounds when they are sharp, while rounded sounds seem to demand softer sounds from our creativity.

The experiment was also reproduced in children of two years, unable to read, with the same results and percentages found in adults.

This simple experiment that they have just done offers a powerful point of investigation for the study of the evolution of language, since it proves that words are never arbitrary, that is to say, that we do not create names and words in a random way, but rather "baptize" "We do an object by using its characteristics and especially the impressions that provoke us.

We might think that in the night of time, when a man (or a woman) tried to communicate with another being using a coherent succession of sounds to which they assigned a particular meaning, it would not really be such an extraordinary event. The truly formidable thing was that his listener, who did not know the rules that his interlocutor had created, managed to understand what he was saying, and above all accepted those sounds as their own and correct.

This acceptance that certain sounds can mean, for example, moon; perhaps it has to do less with a conciliatory agreement than with the recognition of the moon in those same sounds.

Science, at least in this sense, seems to support the foundations of all mythologies. Man never invented words, but "translated" what he saw and felt using his own range of sounds, by the way, finite, but that is never arbitrary and much less random.

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We await your comments and suggestions, until the next post, have a nice day!