I know this is a tired out subject, but I have a take on the "trapped in the woods with a man or bear" trope that I haven't seen others express, and I was wondering what others might make of it.

Basically - the outcome/answers to the thought experiment are being distorted by our unconscious assumptions about "the woods".

Remember those logic riddles that rely on the unconscious assumptions of the riddle answerers?

"a surgeon and his son take a flight. the flight crashes and the son is the only survivor. when he gets to the trauma centre the surgeon working there exclaims - I can't operate! this is my son!

How is this possible?"

the riddle is only a paradox because the audience subconsciously assumes that the surgeon refusing to operate is a man. once you realize that the son's mother is also a surgeon everything makes sense.

So too does the presence of "the woods" distort the man vs bear question with our unconscious biases.

"Lone man in woods" is a cultural trope that involves decades of horror genre antagonists and real-life anti-social people.

We subconsciously associate bad intentions and/or anti-social behaviour to lone men in woods, whereas for similar reasons we assume that the bear is of the least dangerous type. Black bears are found in woods. Polar bears are not.

I suspect if the meme was instead phrased as "your plane crashes at at the north pole. you are the only survivor. would you rather your next encounter was a man or a bear?" then many more (most?) women would pick the man over the bear.

Men at the north pole are culturally associated with Inuits and explorers, not serial killers and anti-social outcasts, whereas bears at the north pole are unconsciously assumed to be polar bears not black bears.

The framing of the man vs bear as a woodsy setting brings with it many unspoken unconscious assumptions that distort peoples answers to the meme in ways they are no more aware of than those answering the riddle of the surgeon's son.