A little (trivial) knowledge…

How come we are so easily influenced by factoids about people, no matter how inconsequential and irrelevant they are?

Here’s a riddle. A man and his son go for a drive, and they are in a terrible accident, in which the father is killed. The son is seriously injured, and he is rushed to hospital, straight into the operating theatre. As the operation is about to start, the surgeon says “I cannot perform this operation — that patient is my son!” If you have not come across it before, take a moment to figure out what might explain the situation.

Did you work it out? If not, here is a short video that reveals the answer (it’s also at the bottom of the article). When we think of a person, whether it’s a surgeon, a police officer, a school head or whatever, we easily make implicit assumptions about their gender, their age, their skin colour or other features.

A genderless person with no skin colour?

It is hard not to make such attributes concrete when picturing the person behind a label — will you immediately think of a heavy metal drummer who is not white and male? We have difficulty imagining a genderless, ageless person whose skin has no colour. This inevitably shapes our world view, and quite possibly our choices…