The Lady or the Tiger?

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"The Lady, or the Tiger?" is a famous short story written by Frank R. Stockton in 1882.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The "semibarbaric king" of an ancient land utilized an unusual form of administering justice for offenders in his kingdom. The offender would be placed in an arena where his only way out would be to go through one of two doors. Behind one door was a beautiful woman hand-picked by the king and behind the other was a ravenous tiger. The offender was then asked to pick one of the doors. If he picked the door with the woman behind it, then he was declared innocent and as a reward he was required to marry the woman, regardless of previous marital status. If he picked the door with the tiger behind it, though, then he was deemed guilty and the tiger would rip him to pieces.

One day the king found that his daughter, the princess, had taken a lover far beneath her station. The king could not allow this and so he threw the suitor in prison and set a date for his trial in the arena. On the day of his trial the suitor looked to the princess for some indication of which door to pick. The princess, did, in fact, know which door concealed the woman and which one the tiger, but was faced with a conundrum. If she indicated the door with the tiger, then the man she loved would be killed on the spot. However, if she indicated the door with the lady, her lover would be forced to marry another woman and even though he would be alive she would never be with him again. Despite this Catch-22 she does end up indicating a door, which the suitor then opens. At this point the question is posed to the reader, "Did the tiger come out of that door, or did the lady?" the question is not answered, though, and is left as a thought experiment regarding human nature.

From its publication and surprise ending, "The Lady, or the Tiger?" has come into the English language as an expression meaning an unsolvable problem.

[edit] Footnote

While the nature of the problem presented in this short story is not unique, it is extremely unusual.

Most thought experiments, or accounts of scenarios such as this, are intentionally (or, even, sometimes unintentionally) skewed towards the inevitable production of a particular solution to the problem posed; and this happens because of the way that the problem and the scenario are framed in the first place.

In this case, the way that the story unfolds is so "end-neutral" that, at the finish, there is no "correct" solution to the problem.

Therefore, all that one can do is to offer one's own innermost thoughts on how the account of human nature that has been presented might unfold—according to one's own experience of human nature—which is, obviously, the purpose of the entire exercise.

The extent to which the story can provoke such an extremely wide range of (otherwise equipollent) predictions of the participants' subsequent behaviour is one of the reasons the story has been so popular over time.

Another is that the story is often given to creative writing classes, with the students asked to write their own account of what comes next.

[edit] Further reading

Stockton, F.R., "The Lady, or the Tiger?", The Century, Vol.25, No.1, (November 1882), pp.83-86.[1]
Stockton, F.R., "The Discourager of Hesitancy: A Continuation of “The Lady, or the Tiger?”", The Century, Vol.30, No.3, (July 1885), pp.482-484.[2]