“A few weeks ago I had dinner at a friend’s house. At the table, my friend’s 9-year-old daughter challenged me with a riddle. You might be familiar with it. A father and son are involved in a serious car accident. The father dies instantly while the son is airlifted to hospital in a critical condition. When the son arrives at emergency, a surgeon walks in, looks at the patient, and says, ‘I can’t operate on this boy, he’s my son’. So, who is the surgeon?
I rattled off a few quick guesses. The surgeon was the son’s step-dad. The father who died in the crash was the step-dad and the surgeon was the biological father. Or the boy’s adopted father… It took me minutes. My friend’s daughter was looking at me as if I had three heads. After a little while, she asked, ‘What is wrong with you? It’s the mum!’
I was so embarrassed. I thought ‘OMG, what is wrong with me?!’ I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of the mother. It was such an obvious answer once I’d heard it.”
When I read that story in the anecdote.com blog this weekend I also could not think of the right answer. And it caught out my daughter (who is studying a medical-related subject) and wife (who is a doctor). My teenage son got it in the end.
“This is a great example of how our assumptions are so deeply ingrained that a puzzle with an obvious answer can leave us stumped. I can’t help extrapolating from this about how unconscious assumptions influence our decisions and perspectives on the many tough challenges we’re trying to tackle – workplace equality, for example. This article from Psychology Today explains that ‘confirmation bias has us thinking that we’re thinking and evaluating rationally when we’re actually not’.”
We all know about “equalities” and I’ve been assuming I’m good on that front. But with this little story a penny dropped for me that I still have some of those unconscious biases, even if consciously I don’t.
See also my previous blog post Big data has unconscious bias too
Why do you think that riddle catches us out?
The sum is greater 