Lee WA boy, a car crash and a surgeon who won’t operate. It’s been catching people out since the seventies.
A father and his son are in a car crash. The father dies at the scene. The boy is rushed to hospital and straight into theatre, and the surgeon takes one look at him and says, “I can’t operate on this boy. He’s my son.” How?
Nothing in the story is hidden from you. The trick is in the bit you filled in yourself.
Deborah Belle and her colleagues at Boston University put it to college students. Fewer than a third worked out the surgeon could be his mother. Two thirds named some kind of father, and more of them came up with a second dad in a same-sex couple than came up with his mum.
People will invent a whole new family before they picture a woman holding the scalpel.
Source: Belle, Tartarilla, Wapman, Schlieber and Mercurio, Sex Roles, 2021