>> HOST: Welcome to Outsmarting Human Minds, the podcast on
understanding the mind to make better decisions in life and
at work.
>> PROFESSOR MAHZARIN BANAJI: When I want to teach people in
the starkest way possible about the limits of their own minds, I
often will give them the now well-known
"father and his son in a car accident" riddle.
>> HOST: We're listening now to Professor Mahzarin Banaji of
Harvard University.
>> PROFESSOR MAHZARIN BANAJI: The riddle goes something like
this: The father and his son are in a car accident.
The father dies at the scene.
The boy, badly injured, is rushed to the hospital.
The attending surgeon looks at the boy and says, "I can't operate
on this boy.
He's my son."
How can this be?
This question was posed to me in 1985, and I thought long and hard
about it and I said, "well, the father who died in the car could
have been the boy's adoptive father, and the surgeon could
have been the same boy's biological father.
That's certainly logically possible."
>> HOST: And that's just one of many answers that we can come
up with.
The Boston radio station WBUR recently posed this riddle, and I
just want to play some of the responses that they got.
>> FEMALE SPEAKER: Perhaps he meant "grandson" and he just left
out the "grand" really quickly.
No, that's not, that's not right.
>> MALE SPEAKER: The father who died at the accident was the
step-father.
>> FEMALE SPEAKER: Because the father in the car that died with
the boy is actually a priest.
>> MALE SPEAKER: It's a same sex marriage.
>> FEMALE SPEAKER: Or the dad didn't really die and was
revived somehow and rushed to the hospital and --
>> MALE SPEAKER: One of the fathers was a sperm donor?
>> HOST: So some of these are reasonable, others are more of a
stretch, but like most riddles, the answer—when revealed—
is simple.
>> PROFESSOR MAHZARIN BANAJI: The surgeon is the boy's mother.
Duh! Why didn't I get the answer right in 1985?
>> HOST: In retrospect, this seems like a no-brainer, but a
survey conducted just a few years ago asked children and
college undergraduates the same riddle, and they found
two things:
First, only 15% of the respondents got the riddle right.
And second, life experience didn't influence their answers
at all.
>> PROFESSOR MAHZARIN BANAJI: Recently, I was lecturing about
these topics to a large group of people, and I saw that when I
asked the audience "what's the right answer here?", and a bunch of
people said "the surgeon is the boy's mother," I noticed that a
woman sitting at one of the tables up front near me just hit
her head on the table [thud] — hard enough that I think I heard
a sound.
So later, when she came up to talk to me about this—with a
blue bruise on her head—I said to her, "you shouldn't have hit
your head so hard on the table when you heard the right answer."
And she said to me, "of course I should have.
My mother is a surgeon."
Think about this.
A person whose mother is a surgeon couldn't get the right
answer here.
How can this be?
So it's not the "how can this be?" of the riddle.
It's "how can it be that we can't get to the right answer?"
>> HOST: Stories like this show us just how much our stereotypes
influence how we interpret the world around us.
And today's podcast is particularly appropriate, because recently we
saw the surgeon riddle come to life and make national news.
In October 2016, the Washington Post reported a story about
Tamika Cross, a woman who was mid-flight when she heard
another airline passenger calling for help.
The passenger's husband was unresponsive and needed medical
attention, and luckily for them Tamika Cross was a fourth year
medical resident sitting just two rows away.
She immediately raised her hand to offer help. But in a social
media post she made after the flight landed, Dr. Cross, who is
young, black, and female, described being told by the
flight attendant, "oh no, sweetie, put your hand down.
We're looking for actual physicians or nurses or some
type of medical personnel.
We don't have time to talk to you."
Now she offered her help several times, but the flight attendant
demurred until another doctor, an older white man, offered to help.
So why did this happen?
Did Cross' age, race, or gender influence the flight
attendant's judgment?
We can't say for sure, but research shows us that we do
judge books by their covers.
So for instance, a study conducted at Yale in 2012 asked over 100
STEM professors across the country to evaluate one of two
student resumes for a lab manager position.
Now, these resumes were identical, but the names at the
top were different.
One was John, and one was Jennifer. And when the candidate
had a male-sounding name like John, he was perceived as being
more competent, people were more excited to mentor him, and he
was offered $4,000 more a year than if the name at the top
was Jennifer.
We can all be the targets of bias, and we can all
be its perpetrators.
Mahzarin herself has been on both the giving and the
receiving end of these kinds of biases.
When Mahzarin was a young professor at Yale, students
often mistook her for her own assistant.
>> PROFESSOR MAHZARIN BANAJI: What intrigued me is that they
didn't have any doubt as to whether I was or was not
Professor Banaji.
They didn't say "are you possibly Professor Banaji?"
They so expected it to be somebody not like me that they
would simply ask about when he was going to be back.
>> HOST: Yet experiencing this bias first hand didn't stop
Mahzarin from committing the same error.
>> PROFESSOR MAHZARIN BANAJI: I was in a surgical ward once
getting ready for surgery, when I saw a young nurse, and I asked
her to point me to the anesthesiologist with whom
I needed to talk prior to the surgery.
I remember her expressionless face and she said, "I am
the anesthesiologist."
Her look told me that this had happened to her many times
before. And of course I was annoyed that I didn't pause to
allow for that possibility. But she looked so young!
She was a woman!
I often joke that such mistakes are not always highly
consequential, but hey, it really isn't a good idea to have an
angry anesthesiologist working on keeping you alive!
>> HOST: We laugh about these kinds of mistakes, but sometimes,
as in the case of the ill passenger on Tamika Cross'
flight, the potential consequences can be serious.
So how do we respond to situations like this and prevent
them from happening again?
Let's take a look at the airline's own response.
They didn't ignore the problem.
They changed their policy.
Medical professionals are now no longer required to show
credentials before assisting passengers in need.
>> PROFESSOR MAHZARIN BANAJI: Because after all, what's the
chance that someone would impersonate an MD during an
in-flight emergency?
>> HOST: In this example the airline's response is worth
focusing on, they recognized that all the training in the
world won't keep busy flight attendants from falling back on
stereotypes in stressful situations — that, in addition to
education, the best solutions lie in improving the practices
and policies that shape our actions.
That's how we can outsmart human minds most effectively.
That's the takeaway.
>> PROFESSOR MAHZARIN BANAJI: The world of the workplace has
grown so much.
The skills we are seeking come in such a diversity of forms.
We've got to be able to recognize talent no matter how
it presents itself: a youthful judge, a male nurse, a female
construction worker.
To all of these, we've got to say "why not?"
We can't afford to lose out on talent just because it comes in
a package we didn't expect.
>> HOST: Outsmarting Human Minds is a program founded by Mahzarin
Banaji, devoted to improving decision making using insights
from psychological science.
Support for Outsmarting Human Minds was provided by a grant
from PwC to Harvard University.
This episode was developed with Olivia Kang and Evan Younger.
Music was composed by Miracles of Modern Science.
Sound editing and mixing was done by Evan Younger.
Permission for excerpts from Radio Boston was provided
by WBUR.
For all studies cited in this podcast, go to
outsmartinghumanminds.org.