Why are riddles and brain teasers popular in our culture? What do people get out of hearing confusing, contrived scenarios that sort of make sense in the end? Are they just fun, or is there something more at play? I was thinking about these questions a while back and drew some conclusions that might just make sense.
To start with, humans are naturally competitive. We have sports teams, business, and even games to illustrate this (you could argue that games are just entertainment, but doesn’t some of that entertainment derive from winning and losing?). So as competitive beings, when someone comes up to us and says “I have a riddle,” what we’re essentially hearing is, “I have some knowledge that you don’t, but I’m going to test you to see if you can figure it out.” The riddle is interpreted as a challenge and we must prove ourselves to the riddler by completing that challenge.
After initially conceiving this idea, I asked my brother, Nick, if he wanted to hear “something confusing that sort of makes sense.” He said, “how long?” I responded, “never mind, do you want to hear a riddle?” He instantly said yes. This made sense to me: why should Nick have wasted his time hearing something confusing that sort of makes sense? There was no potential benefit for him, no positive incentive. But when I instead offered him a riddle, the incentive appeared: he could prove to himself and to me that he possessed the same knowledge I did. The challenge had been accepted.
Unfortunately for Nick, I did this for the sake of the experiment and thus had no riddle or confusing tale prepared for him. But wait, isn’t a riddle “something confusing that sort of makes sense?” That’s exactly what a riddle is. Changing the phrasing of something that had no personal benefit to a riddle was all it took for Nick to go from an unenthused “how long” to an instantaneous “yes.” His inherent competitiveness took over and he eagerly awaited the riddle.
On TV shows and in movies this hidden aspect is not only understood but made obvious. Many scenes involve heroes unable to advance unless they can solve a riddle. Whether it’s simple wordplay or the thing with the twin brothers (one always lies, the other tells the truth) the riddle determines whether or not the hero is worthy of passing. In viewing these scenes, we assign the “challenge” of the riddle only to the specific cinematic scenario, but in reality a riddle’s challenge grips us more often than we realize.
I’m going to show you one of my favorite “riddles.” Below there’s a white sheet of paper with a dot in the middle.
What is it?
Give up?
It's a polar bear blinking in a blizzard, of course!
Now what do you feel? You’re probably thinking that that was pretty dumb and there’s no way anyone could have guessed that correctly. If someone tells a riddle or presents a problem with a bad or unsatisfactory solution, we’re likely to call them out. By having us hear the answer (and thus admit defeat) we have given up the challenge. So when we learn that the challenge didn’t make sense or was un-aswerable, we want to redeem that moment of intellectual inferiority by calling out the riddler and discrediting their entire problem. This also explains why we don't readily welcome hints. A hint provides assistance, so if we solve the riddle with a hint then we don't feel as if we truly match up to the riddler.
So what is my point here? Should we stop telling riddles altogether? No, they’re good fun and can be quite clever. I’m not suggesting abandoning the competition. I’m merely offering up why we are interested in them. They provide us competitive humans with a little challenge, a little brain exercise that measures and compares our abilities. The Riddler wasn’t a good Batman villain just because he threatened to kill someone; he was a good villain because he’d keep you entertained with a riddle while threatening to kill someone. That’s probably taking the competitiveness aspect too far, but at least now we know why he was so entertaining.
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Also, watch Batman face off against the Riddler in this collegehumour video!
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