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Logic puzzle
No Googling, no editing of your answer:
Edit: I'll post the explanation later so don't spoil it for the others by posting analysis!
Edit2: If you can, try not to read other peoples' answers before deciding for yourself.
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?And yes, I got it wrong myself ;-).
A) Yes.
No.
C) Cannot be determined.
Edit: I'll post the explanation later so don't spoil it for the others by posting analysis!
Edit2: If you can, try not to read other peoples' answers before deciding for yourself.
Comments
If Anne is Unmarried, Jack, who is married(again, to who is irrelevant) he's looking at Anne. Again, the answer is Yes.
According to the rules of the question, George cannot be married to either Jack or Anne.
I can see where most people trip up - At first, I assumed that we need to know who Anne is Married to, and then I re-read the question, and realised that it doesn't matter who she's married to, just if she is or not.
Then, upon further thought, I realised that this still doesn't matter, because Jack is always married, And therefore, If she's unmarried or married doesn't make a difference, because if one person in the question is always married, then one person is always looking at an unmarried person.
To lay it out simply, with bolded arrows to indicate a connection that gives a "Yes" answer. -
Jack -> Anne -> George
Jack(Married)-> Anne (Married) -> George(Unmarried)
Jack(Married) -> Anne(Unmarried) -> George(Unmarried)
Also I should note that there is really no downside to getting this riddle wrong since it is an example for negatively correlating with respondents' intelligence.
Edit: Fixed mistake in explanation.
EDIT: I was wrong.
Spoiler diagram.
I hope nobody goes for B.
More than 80 per cent of people answer this question incorrectly. If you concluded that the answer cannot be determined, you’re one of them. (So was I.) The correct answer is, yes, a married person is looking at an unmarried person.
Most of us believe that we need to know if Anne is married to answer the question. But think about all of the possibilities. If Anne is unmarried, then a married person ( Jack) is looking at an unmarried person (Anne). If Anne is married, then a married person (Anne) is looking at an unmarried person (George). Either way, the answer is yes.
To figure this out, most people have the intelligence if you tell them something like “think logically” or “consider all the possibilities.” But unprompted, they won’t bring their full mental faculties to bear on the problem.
And that’s a major source of dysrationalia, Stanovich says. We are all “cognitive misers” who try to avoid thinking too much. This makes sense from an evolutionary point of view. Thinking is time-consuming, resource intensive and sometimes counterproductive. If the problem at hand is avoiding the charging sabre-toothed tiger, you don’t want to spend more than a split second deciding whether to jump into the river or climb a tree.
So we’ve developed a whole set of heuristics and biases to limit the amount of brainpower we bear on a problem. These techniques provide rough and ready answers that are right a lot of the time – but not always.
Hence the correct answer is C.