Hi all,
I'm a linguistics undergrad at UCL. I've been thinking recently about the
following puzzle, and would be interested to see other linguists' views on
it. The puzzle goes something like this:
"A boy and his father are walking along a path on the top of a cliff on a
windy day. A loose stone causes them to loose their grip and they both
tumble over the edge of the cliff. An ambulance soon arrives on the scene to
examine the bodies. They conclude that the father is dead, but that the boy
might still survive. The boy is rushed to hospital and into an operating
theatre where a surgeon is waiting. Just before the operation is about to
start, the surgeon looks at the boy and announces 'I cannot operate on this
boy, he's my son!'"
How can this be?
(think about this and then scroll down to see the answer)
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Answer: The surgeon is the boy's mother!
This is a fairly well known puzzle, and most people who are told it for the
first time can't work out the answer. My question is, how does it work? I
present three hypotheses:
Hypothesis 1: We hold in our heads the stereotypical (you might say
'sexist') idea that surgeons are mostly men. This idea is so steeped in our
minds that we cannot imagine the surgeon being female.
Hypothesis 2: When we read the story, as soon as we come across the surgeon
character, we assign this some mental representation in our minds. All
singular human characters MUST have a gender as the minimum characteristic.
Based on our (stereotypical) knowledge of surgeons, we quickly assign the
male gender to the mental character. We are given no reason to doubt this
guess until we come to the final statement, at which point our deduction
system isn't strong enough to shake off our previously-held assertion.
Hypothesis 3: The answer might be partly due to stereotypical notions of
surgeons, but we are also led astray by the wording of the question. In
particular, the final utterance includes three male-gendered words: 'boy,
'he' and 'son'. This use of the male gender requires us to access concepts
of maleness in our minds which consequently spill over into our mental image
of the surgeon.
The three hypotheses carry quite different implications! It may be possible
to test them using these tests:
Test 1: Reverse the puzzle, using a stereotypically female occupation (eg
nurse) and having the mother die.
Test 2: Do some experimental work using some more neutral characters to see
if people automatically assign tentative genders to mental characters.
Test 3: Change the puzzle by having a girl walking along the cliff with her
father so that the final line is 'I cannot operate on this girl, she's my
daughter'.
Comments/ideas welcome (either direct to me or shared with the list)!
Cheers,
Frankie Roberto,
frankie.roberto@ucl.ac.uk
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