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I’ll start this article by challenging you.

It’s about solving a riddle. The only condition is time. Once you have read the question, you have to answer by 33 milliseconds.

“Father and son are involved in a terrible car accident. The man dies on the spot. The boy, gravely injured, is transported to the hospital. In the operating room, the surgeon sees the patient and says «I can’t operate. This is my son».”

How is it possible?

This riddle, known as the surgeon dilemma, is useful to show how prejudices, stereotypes, convictions and beliefs work. How much and in what way we allow to be influenced by biases and heuristics, or, more commonly, mental traps, as further proof of man’s irrationality.

If, after 33 milliseconds, you have not reached the solution, it is necessary to read the question again and reanalyze the context from a different point of view, paying attention to the time needed to find the answer.

Why 33 milliseconds? It’s the time required for our emotional brain, our instinct, to analyze a situation of uncertainty and risk and to prepare on how to face it, before we are conscious of what is happening. In other words, the faster you find the solution, the more impervious you are to biases, prejudices and convictions. Vice versa, we should reconsider how people make decisions.

Going back to our riddle, before answering it, I want to reassure you: 86% of people posed with the problem has not found the solution. This is because of the subtle nature of our unconscious prejudices: we are not aware that we have them, and this in itself makes identifying them more difficult, just as preventing and managing them in a functional way is.

Good morning America

The surgeon dilemma has been posed in different contexts, both academic and public, with similar results.

In 2010, when the tv show Good Morning America randomly posed the riddle in the streets of Manhattan, most people were not able to find the answer. Instead, when the producers of the show posed the problem to fifth-graders, most of them answered correctly, without even thinking too much about it.

The solutions proposed were somewhat creative, such as attributing to the mother an extra-conjugal relationship or classifying the couple as a homosexual one. In actuality, it’s much easier: the surgeon is the boy’s mother.

Facing a problem, we tend to find the most complicated solution, willingly ignoring the simplest one, precisely because it’s too simple, even if most times it’s the right one. It’s a clear reference to Occam’s razor: “If you hear the sound of hooves, you think of a horse, not a zebra”. Unless you live in Africa.

In other words, all things being equal, the solution to a problem is the easiest one. It’s useless to complicate a theory or to add elements to a discussion if they’re not required to find the solution or to make something edifying.

Gender bias

Teens and kids, unlike adults, do not have preconceived notions on the gender of a surgeon. They don’t take for granted that a surgeon has to be a male, that’s why they don’t have such a hard time to find the solution.

Specifically, this error is the gender bias, the mistake that leads us to categorize and classify professions and jobs basing on gender, without us being aware of it.

The most interesting datum is the fact that within the 86% that had answered incorrectly (or had not answered at all), half of them were women, most of them working as medical doctors. The gender bias doesn’t spare anyone!

At this point, one could object that the surgeon dilemma is dated and, meanwhile, things could have changed. Unfortunately, 9 out of 10 people have prejudices towards women, according to a 2020 research conducted by the United Nations Development Program which processes data from 75 countries around the world, representing 81% of the world population.

The research is based on an index that measures how gender equality in politics, work and education is hindered by deeply rooted social beliefs. Men seem to have stronger prejudices towards women, but the difference is smaller than one could think: 86% of women and 91% of men has at least one prejudice towards the female world.

8 out of 10 people believe that men are better political leaders, while 4 out of 10 think that men are more able to cover leadership roles in companies and that jobs should be primarily assigned to men, when there are low employment rates.

These data look even more shocking if we think that about 3 out of 10 people (28%) believe that a man being violent towards his wife is acceptable.

It’s all about stature

If the situation is not edifying for women, not even men are spared from gender prejudices. Depending on race, height can be a career accelerator or a danger indicator.

Male leaders that are taller than 5’11 have better chances of having a successful career and getting promotions, and have 15% higher wages than colleagues of shorter stature.

Height is considered to be a very important distinctive trait, even though it is a bias itself. When we feel important, we tend to feel taller than we really are and we think the same about the people around us: the more influential they are, the taller we perceive them.

This insidious trap is the same trap that leads people to use all kinds of tricks to appear taller, as putting insoles in shoes, blowing up their hair, etc… And we still haven’t talked about the latest trick in cosmetic surgery: breaking your bones, in order to insert metal bars and gain an inch in height.

Stature can represent a strengthening factor in the career of men. But only if they’re white. And we go back to gender bias.

For men of color, being too tall favors the idea of danger. Studies have shown that in the USA men of color taller than 6’2 are stopped and searched by law enforcement 6.2 times more than white men of the same stature. And they’re considered less intelligent.

It is difficult, at this point, to look absent-mindedly at the power of biases.

Laura Mondino