Anna Brandberg

Just had my own unconscious bias checked with this riddle: A father & son are in a car crash. The father dies on the spot; the son is rushed to the hospital in critical condition. Upon arrival the surgeon exclaims, "I can't operate on him, he's my son!" How is this possible?

To be fair, the riddle is written to set you up for failure of that test at first glance Human brains are pretty stupid most of the time

Is it though? I think that it's pretty straight forward written, and that our unconscious bias is the one tripping us up all on its own... (How would you have described this exact same situation otherwise?) Agreed re our brains though!

If it were written “a parent and their child”, without putting your brain into a gendered context from the get-go, I think you’d get a more accurate assessment of any unconscious bias, but I def. agree that we’ve been trained to assume people in powerful positions are male.

I would actually be suuuuuuper curious to see how many with the nongendered writing would automatically put mum in the car and dad in surgery (as we’re also trained to assume het relationships), and the assumed gender of the child Oops. There’s the rabbit hole