A reporter-style video, women being asked a simple hypothetical:  Would you rather encounter a man or a bear in the woods?

Almost without hesitation, most women answered: the bear.

The intent of the question was clear. It was designed to surface something real: that women fear men, that male violence is so pervasive that a wild animal feels like the safer bet. That is a legitimate conversation worth having.

But here is my problem. Almost nobody actually thought about the question. And that tells us something important. Not just about gender and safety, but about how we process information, form assumptions, and act on beliefs we’ve never bothered to examine.

Nobody Asked the Follow-Up Question

I grew up in bear country. We camped in bear country regularly when I was a child. I have had bears at my front door, once scratching at it in the middle of the day, after a late-night porch visit by two bears the same week. We eventually had to install an electric bear mat.

So when I heard this question, my mind went somewhere different than most.

Which bear?

Because that question matters enormously. A black bear and a brown bear are not interchangeable risks and the difference could determine whether you survive the encounter.

Here is what I was taught growing up in bear country, a rhyme worth remembering: If black, fight back. If brown, lay down. If you encounter a black bear make loud noises, stand your ground, make yourself big. They can often be deterred. A brown bear? Confrontation may be exactly the wrong move. The aggressive response that saves you from one species could get you killed by the other.

And here is where Mother Nature adds her own twist: you cannot simply go by color. A black bear can actually be brown, reddish, or even light-colored. The reliable identifier is the shoulder hump. A prominent hump means brown bear. No hump means black bear. That is the distinction that changes your entire strategy and it is not something most people know.

Grizzlies, for what it is worth, are a subspecies of brown bear. So when people casually say “grizzly” as if it is its own separate category, they are already operating without a full picture.

And that is just the start of the unasked questions. Is it cub season? Because a mother bear protecting cubs operates on a completely different threat level. What does the bear weigh? A bear in summer can top 1,000 pounds and outrun any human being on the planet. Do you have bear spray? Do you know how to use it? What is the terrain?

Not one person in the viral videos asked any of these questions. Not one follow-up. Not a single comment thread I found raised the bear species distinction. Everyone had their answer before they had the information.

That is the real problem this question exposed. And it has nothing to do with bears.

When Narrative Becomes Reality

There is a cognitive pattern I want to name, because I think it explains a great deal of how we operate today in our personal lives, in organizations, and in public discourse.

I call it Proxy Experience Bias: the tendency to treat absorbed narrative as firsthand knowledge, and to make decisions as if that narrative were their lived experience.

It works like this. You have never personally ridden the DC Metro. But you have seen the New York subway portrayed on television for years. The grime, the danger, the chaos. Without realizing it, you file that footage under subway as a general category. The narrative becomes a proxy for experience you have never actually had.

Years ago I was giving a talk in Washington, D.C. The host offered me their townhouse in Dupont Circle, a block from the Metro station. I pushed back. I was uncomfortable. The host had to walk me through it. The Metro is clean, safe, well-designed, and easy to navigate. I did my research and confirmed it. My assumption had been entirely wrong. I had been carrying a bias built not from any subway I had ever ridden, but from years of TV representation of a different subway in a different city.

That is Proxy Experience Bias in action. My proxy was the television narrative. It had replaced real information so completely that I nearly made a poor decision based on it.

This is what I call Secondhand Truth Syndrome: when an absorbed story becomes so internalized it functions as personal truth. You believe it. You act on it. You defend it. But you never lived it, never researched it, never questioned it. It arrived through cultural osmosis and settled in as fact.

Just because we assume something does not make it true. Repeat: just because we assume something does not make it true. But the danger of a secondhand truth is that it feels true. Which means we stop checking and seeking additional information

The Bear Question Is a Perfect Case Study

The question was tapping into something genuine. The women answering “bear” were not lying. Their fear of men is probably real. 

But Proxy Experience Bias shaped the response just as much as any lived experience did. Most of those women have no firsthand experience with bears in the wild. Their reference point for bear behavior is likely nature documentaries, campfire stories, or the general cultural narrative that bears are majestic but dangerous. Not that they are 1,000-pound predators that can close distance faster than you can react, with behavioral differences between species that completely change your survival strategy.

Meanwhile, the default cultural narrative positions the man as the more predictable danger. That narrative is not baseless, but it also is not a complete picture. And when we stop at the narrative without asking the clarifying question, we are not thinking. We are reacting.

The irony is that a question designed to make people think critically became a vehicle for the exact opposite: fast, confident, unexamined response.

The Organizational Lesson

This pattern does not live only in social media debates. Proxy Experience Bias shapes decisions in boardrooms, in hiring, in strategy. Leaders make calls based on industries they have never worked in, markets they have never entered, people they have never actually talked to, believing they have absorbed enough narrative to feel informed.

The most dangerous assumption is the one you do not know you are making.

The discipline that counters it is deceptively simple: ask the follow-up question. Before accepting a narrative, yours or someone else’s, ask what you are actually basing it on. Is this a black bear or a brown bear and do I know how to tell the difference? Is this the DC Metro or the New York subway? Is this what I know, or what I have been told often enough that it feels like what I know?

Those are not the same thing. And the gap between them is where decisions go wrong.

So. The Bear or the Man?

For me, it is the man.

Not because all men are universally safe. Not because the concerns behind this question are not worth taking seriously. But because I have actual, firsthand experience with bears. I know what they weigh. I know how fast they move. I know what bear season means and what it costs to underestimate one. That knowledge, not a narrative, not a meme, not a viral video, is what shapes my answer.

That is the difference between a response and a thought.

The next time you find yourself with an immediate, confident answer to a complex question, do what nobody in those videos did.

Ask the follow-up questions first.