Jack is looking at Anne, but Anne is looking at George. Jack is married, but George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person?
A) Yes.
B) No.
C) Cannot be determined.
This is from this month’s Scientific American — article unfortunately costs money. It’s about “dysrationalia,” which is what happens when people with nominally high IQ’s end up thinking irrationally. A phenomenon I’m sure we’ve all encountered, especially in certain corners of the blogosphere.
And the answer is the first option. But over 80 percent of people choose the third option. Here’s the solution: the puzzle doesn’t say whether Anne is married or not, but she either is or she isn’t. If Anne is married, she’s looking at George, so the answer is “yes”; if she’s unmarried, Jack is looking at her, so the answer is still “yes.” The underlying reason why smart people get the wrong answer is (according to the article) that they simply don’t take the time to go carefully through all of the possibilities, instead taking the easiest inference. The patience required to go through all the possibilities doesn’t correlate very well with intelligence.
Well, technically, Anne could be a canary, not a person, so the answer is technically C, but you got me good on the false reasoning, now I’m just trying to justify my wrong answer.
So experimentally, patience is obviously an important part of intelligence, because people with less patience are less good at rationally solving problems. No excuses needed!
Interesting, that this question can not be posed in Russian, because word “married” is not symmetric in Russian (Or more exactly answer is C). Female married male and male married female are different words. One can infer that not-quite-smart but smart enough Russians foreseen this puzzle and organized their language in a such way as to not be caught.
Argh! I *think* I would have gotten it right, but I don’t *know* because I couldn’t avoid reading the answer, which you printed immediately below the question.
Patience doesn’t correlate with IQ because IQ values speed.
It isn’t surprising that the pollsters deem irrational anyone who doesn’t want to waste time answering their stupid questions. But they shouldn’t be taken seriously. What’s in it for me? is the completely rational response to this kind of question.
Bevy, you’re making excuses and you know it 🙂
We’re all upset we got it wrong.. Damn I feel silly 🙂
It’s possible that Anne is undergoing a trial separation, so if pressed, she wouldn’t know what to say as to the married/unmarried question, regardless of what the law says, so her marriage is, like Schroedinger’s cat, neither alive nor dead. The human heart is a complicated thing. This is why I chose C. Just kidding, I’m dysrational.
I chose A fairly quickly for the right reason and thought boy that was easy….mmmm perhaps too easy? Then I spent 5 minutes wondering if this is a trick question….so I am not dysrational.
However, I am paranoid.
Then again, Anne and Jack could each be in same-sex marriages. That way, whether or not they’re married could depend on which jurisdiction they’re in.
Just my way to muddy the waters and to say that I’m bummed out by what happened in Maine.
It took me only a few minutes to get the correct answer…after I read the explanation.
Hmm…
I too got the wrong answer.
I now realize I was solving the wrong problem. The next step was to work out what I did wrong, and see what I can learn from this example.
I was attempting to determine if Anne was maried, this is neither the question asked, nor is it relevant to answering the actual question.
The question relates to a characteristic of the ‘system’ as a whole: does it contain a pair of objects that satisfies a given condition. There are 2 pairs we have information about, and Anne is in both of them. As implied in the explanation, the marital state of Anne is only relevant in determining which of the 2 pairs may satisfy the relationship. However, we are not asked which pair might satisfy the condition, nor exactly how many pairs satisfy the condition, rather if at least one pair satisfies the condition.
I am a software developer, and sometimes tracking down bugs, or determining how to do something new, takes me longer than I would like – I suspect that this example indicates one cause of my problems.
Hopefully, I can put this new insight into practice!
Well, I don’t fully agree that “the patience required to go through all the possibilities doesn’t correlate very well with intelligence”. Of course there’s no point in going through possibilities that don’t help solving the problem (that’s where intelligence is a factor), but the number of possibilities one should go through has a lower limit bellow which it’s just lazy disregarding IQ, and an upper limit above which it’s not that intelligent to keep exploring them if solving the problem isn’t worth it.
Patient correlates with IQ in the sense that one should stop trying if it’s not worth it, but stopping too soon I believe is more lazy than smart.
Regards
For those (like me) who got wrong on this one you can still have a look at a related New Scientist article ( http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427321.000-clever-fools-why-a-high-iq-doesnt-mean-youre-smart.html ) which DON’T cost money.
Is a married person looking at an unmarried person?
So we have two possible pairs, in the case of Jack and Ann we cannot tell since we don’t know if Ann is married in the case with Ann and Gorge same thing so the answer is C.
To me this is a perfectly rational approach and I would have to have damn good reasons to ponder such questions any deeper than that. The explanation given in the post is certainly true in my case as I definitely view checking each case as way more effort then it’s worth, even though it did occur to me that it might be a tricky question it was still nowhere near the incentive I would need 😛
>>>Well, technically, Anne could be a canary, not a person, so the answer is technically C, but you got me good on the false reasoning, now I’m just trying to justify my wrong answer.
if anne is a canary, then she isn’t married, so a married person is still looking at an unmarried person. 😀
This trick puzzle is an excellent illustration of the principle. And yes, where Sean says that patience doesn’t correlate very well with intelligence, I presume he means intelligence as it is traditionally measured by “IQ tests”.
I think that anyone who tries to make up excuses for not getting it right lacks integrity as well as intelligence – but there could have been two different Annes. 🙂
Awesome. Only, in your explanation, you refer to Jack as John. This didn’t help my already spinning mind!
Yes, indeed Anne and George might both be canaries. However, even so, we can be essentially sure that somewhere in the world, a married person is looking at an unmarried person, so the answer is A.
The psychometrician response would be that if these question does not correlate well with g, then it is not a good question.
Having grown up on a steady diet of Raymond Smullyan books, I got the correct answer right away. Does that mean that I’m rational, or just that I’ve done so many logic problems that effectively parsing them is second nature to me?
Meredith, I gave Jack back his nickname. Thanks for the catch.
Like The Science Pundit, I have a large collection of books filled with these sorts of puzzles. I didn’t purchase any of them however. Due to the “changes” in the curricula of k-12 education in this country (NCLB?), there simply is no longer time to teach the children how to think rationally and logically through problem solving steps. Thus my collection came from books that were heading to the pulp plant, along with lots of other teacher workbooks and materials (that i passed on to my student teachers).
I’m one of the dumb people who got the answer right the first time, because the first thing I thought was, “Hmm, I wonder if this is like the Cretan-liar problem, where you can get a correct answer by studying the two cases?”
In any case, who cares what the number on an IQ test is?