Steve is:
Very shy (& withdrawn)
Invariably helpful
but has little interest in people
or the world of ‘reality’
A meek & tidy soul
with a need for order & structure
& a passion for detail
Given these 10 (or fewer) characteristics, is Steve more likely to be a farmer or a librarian?
It must have been the late 80’s or very early 90’s. I was reading what literary types would doubtless call a genre novel. The story began describing the Secretary of State coming out of the Department, getting into the official car, putting the Red Box down on the seat …
I remember nothing about the rest of the story except that somewhere about half way down page 3 there came a sentence which began ‘She …’
Startled (as the author intended) I wondered Who is she?
Quickly checked back to see which character I had missed.
She, of course was the Secretary of State.
At the time a female Secretary of State was indeed a rare creature, so I, & other readers, had been reacting perfectly rationally in assuming that she was a man.
At least in the opinion of psychologist Daniel Kahneman who devised the question about Steve. If you are a rational American undergraduate in psychology taking part in one of his experiments, you are supposed to see through the trick & say ‘farmer’; since male farmers outnumber male librarians by 20 to 1. If you answer ‘librarian’ you are being fooled into leaping to a conclusion based on stereotype, forgetting that many farmers must, by sheer weight of numbers, must share these characteristics.
On the other hand feminists more militant than I would no doubt say I was making stereotypical assumptions about ther characters in my story. Why can’t a woman be a Secretary of State?
And what boring stories we would tell each other if our male characters were always more likely to be farmers than librarians, whatever their characteristics.
Link
Steve the librarian
Related postThe contingency of life
