Riddle who is the doctor

What you are seeing in this experiment is not only a narrow view of the sexes but a lack of critical thinking skills. The validity of the conclusion reached here is questionable. It is telling that the results were no different for the gender reversed alternate version of the riddle.

That would suggest that the underlying effect exposed by this riddle is not schema induced gender bias, but rather cognitive limitations imposed by linguistic formulation. The phrasing of a question often predetermines the response due to our language processing facility.

Is it also possible that a gender bias researcher may be biased toward seeing gender bias? In comparison, languages that have derived from Latin, usually have a strong connotation of gender associated to the words, for a more explicit meaning.

Have you seen it? The same issue arises in the Spanish version, which is that a son and his father get into a car accident and are taken to the nearest clinic.

I was thinking same about Slavic languages and probably more languages has words for men and woman. In these languages you probably unconsciously relate to word describing jobs ending with consonant to a men. I would like to know if all participants in research were native English speaker and if English was there only language.

That would maybe change numbers. Well, its an interesting question. I have to admit that I did not reach the conclusion that the researchers were looking for. I simply thought that the father and son were not related. The riddle made no stipulation that they were related. As to the conclusions, is it really any surprise that the researchers got the results they did?

Our outlooks may be changing. Sure, now I know how deep it is, but I am not going to go over the falls. Why take an unnecessary dig at the Bible Belt in an otherwise useful column, a column about bias, no less? Word, Kate. This was the first thing I took from this article. How stupid and trivial to indulge in characterizations like this. Outrage would flare and the author would be censured, if not lose his job. Come on!

Exactly what I thought when I read that sentence. It is like people preaching tolerance, but showing no tolerance for those that believe differently than themselves. What they really mean is that everyone should be tolerant of my views and of those that believe like me.

However, they are not twins- neither fraternal nor identical. Is this possible or impossible? Aside: The answer to my old riddle is yes, absolutely! Perhaps my gender bias was slow thinking. Yet, I found myself thinking faster in the recognition of the opaque geographic and religious bias within the piece. Thus, an interesting piece on at least three kinds of bias: gender, geographic, and religious. However, there is a stronger association neurologically with word-pair connections as father-son and mother-daughter activates and excites two different connection pathways, so the time it may take for someone to reach for a word from the opposite gender may be a while, or not at all.

Good luck getting this into any respectable journal, because the conclusions do not follow logically on the outcomes. The parenthetical remark about the results reversing when the genders are changed proves, without doubt, that it is the wording of the riddle and not gender bias that influences the results. I assume the parenthetical was added later because many commenters asked whether there was a control group. Just based on statistics. What I think is the more valuable information gained from this study is that the majority of respondents were more likely to accept that the parents were a same sex couple than break gender norms.

Does gender bias trump sexual orientation bias? It would be interesting for them to add a control group or correct the language and redo the study so we could have a more accurate picture of what is happening here.

Oh, what a bigoted intolerant bunch we all are. Who will save us from ourselves? Furthermore, there is a cop-out solution that betrays your insistence on pointing out gender bias to the detriment of adoption. The boy could have been adopted by the father in the accident, and surgeon could be the biological father in an open adoption. Well, how would the biological father know that that was his son? This father could have seen his child or even just pictures of him on a regular enough basis to recognize him when he saw him.

The only states where same-sex marriage is illegal as of are Georgia and North Dakota, at that they might be struck down by the U. So check your facts before generalizing a whole third of the country you bigot. This riddle is being analyzed based on gender bias, projecting that people who answer do so on gender discrimination.

I just asked this riddle to a few friends. Could this be what those BU students had in mind as well? When you are asked a question by a stranger, of course the answer should not be trivial and requires some creativity or imagination! I have been playing people with this riddle for about 30 years, since discovering it in Scientific American.

Firstly, it is good to make it a long drawn out tale with lots of extraneous detail to confound the recipient. Then, as others have pointed out, the sex of other characters may create a cognitive gender set. As such, this may confound interpretation in terms of gender bias but the riddle nonetheless powerfully illustrates the unconscious operation of either cognitive set, gender stereotypes or other perceptual biases.

For me this is more important and basic than whether it is based in gender bias or these other considerations, which most people have poor awareness of and responses to the riddle illustrate. That said, I doubt that a reverse role version would result in anyone having trouble identifying a male surgeon as the father.

Most importantly, you must NEVER reveal the solution until the recipient has either shown they can answer it themselves or have tried with a number of explicit attempts. These things come out of otherwise very intelligent people.

I even ran it past a young woman who was a junior doctor and training to be a trauma surgeon herself! I dont know if that was true at the time it was or 2 , but it is an attempt at rationalisation that is echoed by many of the comments seen above made by people who read the answer presented in the article so promptly, without having in honesty been challenged to produce it themselves.

I would say, regarding this last point about how the riddle should be presented with the solution witheld , that most of those who here have dismissed the riddle with such comments as that its so obvious only a stupid person would not see the solution, would not have seen it themselves had it been presented properly. Sadly, therefore, I am afraid that the author of the article has effectively botched his chance to make an effective point by a not acknowledging the other variables than gender, b not presenting the riddle in an effective way and above all c not witholding the solution until at least the end of the piece if not altogether.

The operator is a female. If you watch the movie tin cup you would already know the answer. I thought along the same lines. Quite a sad excuse for a doctor. By the time the next available doc gets off the golf course,drives to the hospital,and cleans up for surgery, the boy is dead. For the riddle about father, son and surgeon, I thought of an another answer.

The first thing that came into my mind is whose father? And whose son? A persons answer doesnt necissarily imply that they are sexist at all. It may show sexist bias in some instances but in general cannot. Just because someone imagined a man as the doctor doesnt mean they believe that men are the only competent gender for medecine.

Is google sexist? This riddle has a better chance showing how the media and entertainment masculinize or feminize certain things than it does determining if someone is sexist. You are spot on.

Let me add this. This is an article that I am supposed to read to make me less biased if I happen to be biased. It is hypocritical because it approves of the clear bias by the author. This article inflames the fight and does not help gender bias at all. If you are aware of the father being gay then you are enlightened. In an article about bias the author clearly shows his bias. If I am a liberal I would be angry because you just weakened our side by being hypocritical.

If I am a conservative you made me angry and did nothing to help me supposedly to be less biased. You just gave me more evidence that you are a hypocrite and you are disqualified from helping me if I decide to have an open mind which you obviously think I need. That is bias and an assumption.

True the woman is connected with reproduction, but that is logical not biased. This has nothing to do with competence.

You just took a cheap shot at men. Its not ok to be abusive, profane, self promotional, misleading, incoherent, but it is ok for the author to show a clear liberal bias in an article on gender bias and bash bible believers? So we trade on bashing for another. This is supposed to help people? This is the kind of thing that happens that just makes it worse and does not fix anyone. It just trades bashing by conservatives for bashing by liberals.

That means no one is right or good. That may explain the result. I live in the Bible belt, answered the question correctly, and surprise! You are pointing out one bias while reinforcing another. Maybe yiu should consider your own ignornace. Therefore,I would need more information to answer the question.

So…people are wired to look at the world through stereotypes and assumptions? Imagine that. At their core they are survival reflexes. All it does is move the ball…into what someone else considers to be enlightened.

All of the responses have different views because they were brought up differently. I immediately thought the surgeon was the Mom or possibly the gay dad. Most of us make assumptions before discovering the facts. This is an eye opener article. It really forces us to think again and again before taking any decision based on our perception about gender which we have build unconsciously over the period. At one point I thought could it could have been the birthmother and that this child had been given up for adoption and now life is flashing before her eyes at this point.

This is my comment on this. It leaves a lot of room for interpretation and assumption. So, to call people out as prejudice is kind of unfair. Next time, if you write this riddle in Spanish, I bet you that most would not have this issue.

Gender bias continues even if we become more and more aware about it, because it needs a long time to change own behaviors. Truly immediately I had my mind on a man as the surgeon. This actually revealed that we all have this bias mind set when it comes some professions. Learning therefore, is that one should not be too quick in arriving at a conclusion in cases like this. HOWEVER, that was in the mid-nineties, long after the idea of a woman being a surgeon had become ingrained in society.

What you need to do is ask people to name every answer they can think of, both mundane and outlandish. But many will name that answer, as well as the doctor being his other gay dad. I think everyone has the right to their own opinion and it is interesting how each invidivual views this situation. This is very thought provoking. The dead so-called father had been cheated by the mother to this boy who had lied to him that this boy is his.

We got you! Of course it hurts, because the injury is there, and it needs fixing; And, It is annoying; But, it is also true. No-one, the doctors were Robert's sisters.

Since the father of the boy has already died in the accident. The doctor has to be the boy's Mother. For hay fever. Why did the ninja go to the doctor?

He had kung-flu! Why did the rooster go to the doctor? It had the cock-a-doodle-flu. He had kung-flu. What do you get when you have two doctors at once? Where does a ship go when it's not feeling well?

To see the dock-tor. When do doctors get mad? When they lose their patience patients. It felt crummy. A man and his son are driving to the supermarket. The dad dies but the son lives.