Abstract

The experiment (total N = 68) was conducted to investigate the impact of conceptual priming in the well-known “surgeon
riddle.” The surgeon riddle is as follows: “Father and son are driving a car. They get into a car accident, the dad dies, son gets rushed into hospital. The surgeon says, ‘I cannot operate, this is my son.’ Who is the surgeon?” The correct answer is “the mother;” however, many participants fail to answer the question correctly. It was argued that the failure could be attributed to the priming effect rather than implicit gender stereotypes. In order to test this hypothesis, three conditions were created: a control group, a non-priming condition and a stereotype condition. For
stereotype condition, the riddle was reformulated as “A mother and her daughter are driving a car…” to observe the
outcomes when the correct answer, the father, is consistent with the stereotypes. For non-priming condition, the riddle was reformulated as “A father and his daughter are driving a car…” expecting the presentation of two sexes to override the priming effect observed in the original riddle. It was predicted that the change in the phrasing once the conceptual priming is overridden, the number of correct answers in the non-priming condition will be same as that of in stereotyping condition. Our results fell between these two extremes: Performance in the non-priming condition (father–daughter) improved (27%) but was far from the ceiling (89%).