【2016-10-07】 #读过《教養的迷思》# 我的评分：★★★★★ 极好（虽然有些过头话），推荐给现在或未来有孩子的朋友。 Harris说的很好，不过，现代家长各种过度紧张兮兮的做法，依我看并不是白板轮/教养论/斯金纳主义或类似理论流行的结果，而是中产焦虑和能动性乐观主义两者结合的众多产物之一，那些理论只是恰好满足了焦虑者的需求而已。  

【2016-12-28】 一群马其顿学生玩营销号逗川普粉的故事，有趣～ 几点观察： 1）这种东西大概不会改变个体的投票选择，但可能会略微提高川普粉投票率， 2）主要功能是心理按摩，没人在意从中得到什么信息， 3）类似游戏对左派玩不动，因为主流媒体已经为他们提供足够多按摩师了，而川普粉的饥渴恰好是个生态空档， 4）facebook看来也是养营销号的好地方， 5）社交网让模因学终于有了可施展的地方，貌似，  

‘When life hands you a lemon, just bite in’ “如果生活递给你一个柠檬，那就去咬它吧” 作者:Judith Rich Harris @ 2016-09 译者:明珠(@老茄爱天一爱亨亨更爱楚楚) 校对:辉格(@whigzhou) 来源:The Psychologist, http://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-29/september/when-life-hands-you-lemon-just-bite Judith Rich Harris takes Lance Workman through her extraordinary fightback against entrenched views of child development. Judith Rich Harris对话Lance Workman，对已被深深认同的儿童发展心理学观点作出了非同寻常的回击。 Judith Rich Harris is a psychologist and author. Judith Rich Harris是一位心理学家和作家。 【译注：粗体字是Workman的提问，常字体是Harris的回答】 I first become aware of you when I read The Nurture Assumption in 1998. In it you proposed that a child’s peer group has greater influence on development than her parents. Can we begin by outlining this theory? 我第一次认识你是读到你1998年出版的《教养的迷思》。在书中你提到，同龄人群体对孩子成长的影响大于父母。我们从简要概括这个理论开始，好吗？ Group socialisation theory was my attempt to solve a puzzle I had encountered while writing child development textbooks for college students. My textbooks endorsed the conventional view of child development – that what makes children turn out the way they do is ‘nature’ (their genes) and ‘nurture’ (the way their parents bring them up). But after a while it dawned on me that there just wasn’t enough solid evidence to support that view, and there was a growing pile of evidence against it. 群体社会化理论是我在撰写儿童发展心理学的大学教材时试图解决的难题。我的教材赞同儿童发展心理学的传统观点——是‘先天本性’（基因）和‘后天培养’（父母养育他们的方式）共同使孩子们形成他们的做事方式。但一段时间后我明白了，并没有足够确凿的证据支持这个观点，同时，反对证据却越来越多。 The problem was not with the ‘nature’ part – genes were having their expected effect. But ‘nurture’ wasn’t working the way it was supposed to. In studies that provided some way of controlling for or eliminating the effects of heredity, the environment provided by parents had little or no effect on how the children turned out. 问题不在于‘天性’部分——基因有其预期效果。不过‘培养’并未如大家所认为的方式发生作用。在一些以某种方式控制或消除了遗传作用的研究中，父母提供的环境对孩子如何变成后来的样子很少或者没有影响。 And yet, genes accounted for only about 50 per cent of the variation in personality and social behaviour. The environment must be playing some role. But it wasn’t the home environment. So I proposed that the environment that has lasting effects on personality and social behaviour is the one the child encounters outside the home. 然而，基因改变个性和社会行为的作用大约只占50%。环境肯定发挥着一定的作用。但这不是家庭环境。因此我认为，持久影响孩子个性和社交行为的环境是其面对的家庭之外的环境。 This makes sense if you think about the purpose of childhood. What do children have to accomplish while they’re growing up? They have to learn how to behave in a way that is acceptable to the other members of their society. How do they do this? Not by imitating their parents! Parents are adults, and every society prescribes different behaviours for children and adults. 如果想想童年的目标，你会发现这是有道理的。随着孩子长大他们不得不做什么呢？他们不得不学习他们的社交圈里其他成员可以接受的行为方式。他们如何做到这一点？不是通过模仿父母！父母是成年人，社会给孩子和成人规定了不同的行为。 A child who behaved like his or her parents (in any context other than a game) would be seen as impertinent, unruly or weird. So the first step in becoming socialised must be to figure out what sort of person you are. Are you a child or an adult? A male or a female? In complex societies there are more categories, but age and gender were probably enough for the small groups of hunter-gatherers of our ancestors. 在除游戏之外的任何情境下，孩子若像父母那样行事，会被视为不得体、任性或怪异。因此，社会化的第一步是弄清楚你属于哪类人。是孩子还是成人？男人还是女人？复杂社会分类更多，但年龄和性别对于我们祖先的狩猎采集小团体可能足够了。 Once a child had identified with a particular social category – let’s say, female child – her next job would be to learn how to behave like the others in her category. A social category is an abstract concept, not necessarily an actual group of children. My use of the term ‘peer group’ turned out to be misleading. I should have said ‘social category’ or perhaps ‘reference group’. 一旦一个孩子明确了自己属于某个特定社会类别——比方说，女童——她接下来的工作将是学会如何像她这个类别的其他人一样行事。一个社会类别是一个抽象概念，并非儿童的实际群体。我后来发现使用‘同龄人群体’这个术语是个误导。我应该说‘社会类别’或者‘参照群体’。 Why?  为什么？ The problem with ‘peer group’ was that it made people think ‘friends’. Group socialisation theory is not about the influence of friends. Friendships are relationships. Socialisation is not a product of relationships. ‘同龄人群体’这个词的问题在于，它让人想到‘朋友’。群体社会化理论无关朋友的影响。友谊是关系。社会化不是关系的产物。 The expanded theory presented in my second book, No Two Alike, explains why. The theory is based on the idea, put forth by evolutionary psychologists such as Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, that the human mind is modular, a collection of specialised devices which each evolved as a solution to a specific problem or need. 我在第二本书《没有两个人是一样》中提出的扩展理论解释了其中缘由。这个理论基于如进化心理学家Leda Cosmides和John Tooby所提出的思想，即人类大脑是模块化的，是一套随着解决某个特定问题或需要而进化出的专门化元件的集合。 I proposed that there are three such devices involved in social development – the relationship system, the socialisation system and the status system. These systems work more or less independently; sometimes they even issue contradictory commands. They collect different kinds of information from the environment and process it in different ways. Friendships – like parent–child relationships – are in the purview of the relationship system, which collects data on specific individuals and makes fine distinctions among them. The socialisation system, in contrast, doesn’t bother with individuals – it computes means. It forms a prototype for each social category. The child is influenced by the norms of the social category she identifies with, even if she never interacts personally with any of its members. 我提出三种元件参与社会发展——关系系统、社会化系统和身份系统。这些系统或多或少独立工作；有时他们甚至发出相互矛盾的命令。它们从环境中收集不同种类信息并以不同方式进行处理。友谊——如亲子关系——属于关系系统范畴，它收集特定个体的数据，并在它们之间做出精准区别。相反，社会化系统与个体无关，它计算的是平均情况。它构成了每种社会类别的原型范式。孩子是被其身份认同的社会类别的规范所影响，即便她从未亲自与群体其他成员发生互动。 The Nurture Assumption completely split the field. People either said it was a serious step forward in our understanding of child development or they just weren’t having any of it. I’m in the first camp – it changed my view of child development. But why do you think there was so much hostility? 《教养的迷思》彻底分裂了这个研究领域。要么有人说这是我们理解儿童发展心理向前迈进的重要一步，要么就说它什么也不是。我是前者，它改变了我关于儿童发展心理学的看法。但是，为什么对它有这么多敌意呢？ Part of the problem was the media coverage, which was often headlined ‘Do parents matter?’. Parents were understandably irked by the question. (My answer, by the way, is: Of course parents matter!) 部分问题出在媒体报道，它们常用‘父母重要吗？’这样的标题。可以理解家长们被这样的问题搞得苦恼不已。（顺便说一句，我的回答是：当然，父母重要！） But the real opposition to my work came from the academic world – from professors of developmental psychology. Some of these people had spent their entire careers doing studies designed to support the traditional view of child development. Then some troublemaker pops up – a complete nobody, with no PhD and no academic affiliation – and announces that the professors are wrong and their studies are worthless. You wouldn’t expect them to greet me with open arms, would you? 但是对我工作的真正反对来自学术世界——发展心理学的教授们。他们中的一些人毕其全部职业生涯做研究，旨在支持儿童发展心理学的传统观点。然后一些捣乱者冒了出来——不知何方人士，没有博士学位，没有学术任职——就胆敢声称教授们是错误的，他们的研究毫无价值。你不会指望他们张开双臂欢迎我，对吗？ You were particularly critical of their correlational studies of development.  你对于发展心理学相关研究表现的特别有批判性。 I still see those worthless studies all the time – they get a lot of publicity. I see them as a shameful waste of time and research money. I see them as reminders that I failed in my goal of reforming the methodology of developmental psychology. 我总是仍然看到那些毫无价值的研究——他们获得大量宣传。我认为这是时间和研究经费的可耻浪费。我将这些视为对我改革发展心理学之方法论的雄心所受挫折的提醒。 The studies are worthless because the results they produce are ambiguous, so the researchers can interpret them any way they please. Let’s say they find a correlation between how often a family eats dinner together and how well their teenager manages to stay out of trouble. Such results are presented as evidence that eating dinner with their parents has ‘protective’ effects on teenagers. 这些研究毫无价值，因为其结果模棱两可，研究者以他们乐意的任何方式解释之。比方说，他们找到了一家人多久一起共进晚餐和青少年多大程度上努力不出乱子之间的相关性。这个结果作为与父母共进晚餐对青少年有‘保护’作用的证据呈现出来。 But the research method provides no way of controlling for, or estimating, the effects of inherited genes on the teenagers’ behaviour. (Conscientious parents tend to have conscientious children.) No way of controlling for what I call ‘child-to-parent effects.’ (Parents are more likely to enjoy eating dinner with well-behaved teenagers.) No way of controlling for the teenagers’ own willingness to show up at dinnertime. (Teenagers are less likely to enjoy eating dinner with their parents if they are doing things their parents don’t approve of.) The researchers assume that, even though these other factors might play a role, some of the correlation must be due to the beneficial effects of family dinners. That is a logically indefensible assumption, not supported by studies that do provide the necessary controls. 但是研究方法却没有提供任何控制或者估计遗传基因影响青少年行为的方法（有责任心的父母的孩子往往有责任心）。没有控制我所说的‘从孩子到父母的影响’（父母更乐意与举止礼貌的孩子共进晚餐）。没有控制青少年自己乐意露面的晩餐时间（如果青少年正在做父母不认可的事情，他们不大可能喜欢与父母共进晚餐）。研究者认为，尽管其他因素可能有一定作用，但一些相关肯定是由于家庭晚餐的正面作用。这是一个逻辑上站不住脚的假设，并且没有得到那些确实控制了其他因素的研究的支持。 I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to state that The Nurture Assumption pretty much made you famous almost overnight. It’s not only a radical alternative to traditional ideas, but also a real ‘page-turner’. Was it your intention to write in that style? 我不觉得《教养的迷思》几乎让你一夜之间出名是夸张的措词。这本书不仅对传统观点来说是激进的，也是真正的‘新篇章开启者’。用这种风格写作是你的目的吗？ Actually, I started out by writing a traditional article and publishing it in a traditional journal, the Psychological Review. No one called it a page-turner. In fact, though it did get some favourable responses from people in other areas of psychology, it was completely ignored by the audience I was hoping to reach – those professors of developmental psychology. 实际上，我一开始是要写篇传统文章发表在传统期刊《心理学评论》上。没有人把它称为新篇章开启者。事实上，尽管它确实得到了其他心理学领域的积极反响，但却被我希望能看到它的观众——发展心理学领域的教授们——完全忽略了。 So I decided to go over their heads, as it were, and take my message directly to the general public. If you’re writing a book on a complex topic and you want people to read it, you have to make it interesting. It also helps if you can give your readers an occasional laugh. My model for how to write a book for the general public was Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct. 因此我决定，这么说吧，越过他们，直接把我的研究呈现在广大公众面前。假如你正在写一本复杂话题的书，还希望有人读它，那你就要让它有趣起来。如果读者时而笑出声来，那也有所帮助。我所借鉴的如何为广大公众写书的模本，是Steven Pinker的《语言本能》一书。 Pinker of course went on to write several more books for the public – all page turners, and in many cases game changers. I noticed that he dedicated The Blank Slate to ‘Don, Judy, Leda and John’. I would assume that three of these are Don Symons, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby. Would I be right in thinking you are the Judy?  当然，Pinker为大众写了不少书——全都是新篇章开启者，许多情况下还是游戏改变者。我注意到他把《白板论》一书献给‘Don, Judy, Leda and John’。我猜其中三个是Don Symons, Leda Cosmides和John Tooby。你是Judy，对吗？ Yes. Steve and I became e-mail friends after I sent him a copy of my Psych Review paper and some comments on The Language Instinct. After we had exchanged a few e-mails, he asked, ‘Have you ever thought of writing a book?’ It wasn’t exactly a new idea to me, but it was nice to have the encouragement. 是的。在我给他寄送了我写的《心理学评论》论文拷贝和对《语言本能》一书的个人见解后，Steve和我成了电邮笔友。后来，我们互通了一些电子邮件，他问我：“你有没有想过写一本书？”这对我实在不是新想法，但它是很好的鼓励。 I think Steve was particularly receptive to my arguments because he’s a psycholinguist. I often use examples from psycholinguistics in explaining my theory, for two reasons. First, the outcome is usually obvious. You don’t need fancy statistical tests to decide whether or not someone has a foreign accent. Second, language and accent are among the very few social behaviours in which genetic differences play no role at all. Whether you speak Japanese or Swahili, whether your accent is Oxbridge or Liverpudlian, has nothing to do with heredity. But it does have a great deal to do with social context. The children of immigrants have the same accent as the other kids in the neighbourhood, even if they use their parents’ native language at home. Around the world, it is quite common for children to use one language at home and a different one outside the home, or one language with Mummy and a different one with Daddy. 我感觉Steve特别能接受我的观点，因为他是心理语言学家。我经常使用心理语言学例子解释我的理论，有两个原因。首先，结果通常显而易见。不需要花哨的统计学计算来确定某人是否有外国口音。其次，语言和口音是极少数遗传基因差异不起作用的社会行为之一。无论你说日语或者斯瓦希里语，无论你操牛津剑桥口音或者利物浦口音，均与遗传无关。而它确实与社会背景有很大关系。即便在家说父母亲的母语，移民孩子的口音与其他邻居孩子也一样。在世界各地，常常可见孩子在家使用一种语言而出门使用另外一种，或者和妈咪说一种语言而和爹地说另一种。 A central tenet of my theory is that social behaviours are tightly linked to the context in which they were acquired. It’s a mistake – one that’s incorporated into all the major theories of child development – to assume that children automatically generalise what they learn, from one context or person to another: Mummy is nice to them so they expect everyone to be nice to them. But discrimination, not generalisation, is the default setting of the baby’s mind. 我的理论的核心要义是，社会性行为与从中习得它的社会情境紧密相连。假设孩子自动将所学内容一般化，从一种情境或一个人推及另外一种或另一个人：就像妈咪善待他们，因此期待人人善待他们——这个假定被植入了儿童发展学的所有重要理论中，但它是错误的。相反，区别对待而非一般化处理，是婴儿心理的默认设置。 Many of the behaviours that children acquire at home would be counterproductive elsewhere. Children who dominate their younger siblings at home would be making a mistake if they tried to treat their schoolmates the same way, especially if they happen to be small for their age. Fortunately, children don’t make that mistake. Firstborns are no more likely than laterborns to try to dominate their peers. 孩子在家习得的许多行为在别处则是有害无益的。在家对弟妹指手划脚的孩子，如果试图以同样方式对待同学，就犯错了，尤其如果他们碰巧在同龄人中个头偏小。幸运的是，孩子不会犯类似错误。排行高的孩子不比排行低的孩子有更多可能性对同龄人指手划脚。 Of course, some of the things children learn at home are useful elsewhere. Those who learn to speak the local language, or to read, or to play a musical instrument, don’t have to acquire these skills all over again when they step outside. But they don’t trot them out automatically. They are tentative at first, until they’re sure that the behaviour or skill they learned at home will also work in the new setting. 当然，也有孩子在家学习的一些事情在别处是有用的。掌握了言说和阅读本地语言或演奏乐器的人，走出家门不必重新学习这些技能。但是，他们不必机械地小跑离家出来。他们先试探，直到确信那些在家里学到的行为或技能在新的环境设定中也管用。 For a young child, it’s safer to discriminate than to generalise. The child’s mind is not short of storage space. A child can store different rules of behaviour for every setting, and different expectations for every individual he or she encounters. 对于小孩子，区别对待比一般化处理更安全。孩子的意识不缺存储空间。可以为不同环境设定存储不同行为规范，以及为他所与之交往的每个人分别存储各自对对方的期望。 Your goal in No Two Alike was to explain why individuals differ so much, even if they grew up in the same family, right? 您写《没有两个人一样》一书是解释为什么每个人如此不同，即使他们在同一家庭长大，对吗？ Right. I realised a couple of years after The Nurture Assumption was published that I had done only half the job: I had explained only how children get socialised. Socialisation is a process that causes children to become more similar in behaviour to their same-sex peers. And yet, despite being socialised, children continue to differ from one another in personality and social behaviour. 对。《教养的迷思》出版后过了几年，我发现自己只做了一半工作：我只解释了孩子是如何社会化的。社会化是导致孩子行为处事更像同性同龄人的过程。尽管被社会化，孩子们的个性和社会行为仍然彼此不同。 If anything, the differences widen during childhood and adolescence. I made some ineffectual efforts to deal with that problem in The Nurture Assumption, but I didn’t have a theory to account for it till I wrote the second book. The improved version of the theory presented in No Two Alike explains how children can, at the same time, become more similar to their peers in some ways and more different in other ways. 很可能，个体差异在孩童期和青春期扩大了。在《教养的迷思》中我做了些无效努力面对这个问题，但没有理论可以解释它，直到我写第二本书。《没有两个人一样》提出的改进版理论解释了为什么孩子在一些方面与同伴更相似，与此同时在另一些方面却变得更为不同。 There was a fair bit of replying to arguments put forward by critics of The Nurture Assumption. Was that one of the aims? 之前你针对《教养的迷思》批评者所提出的观点给出了不少直接回应。那是你的写作目的之一吗？ It was. I was tired of journalists telling me that my theory must be wrong because some expert at some big university had told them that there were plenty of studies that disproved it. I searched diligently for the studies they cited. In some cases they were nowhere to be found; at any rate, they had never been published in a peer-reviewed journal. In other cases a study had been published but the results didn’t do what the experts claimed – they didn’t disprove my theory. In one case, a study they cited actually did the opposite – it supported my theory! 是的。我厌烦了记者告诉我，我的理论肯定错误，因为某些著名大学的某些专家已经告诉他们，有大量研究反驳我的理论。我努力分析他们引用的研究。有些研究什么也没发现；不管怎么说，它们从未在同行评议的学术期刊上发表。另一些研究，发表的一项实验没获得专家声称的实验结果——并没有反驳我的理论。一个研究援引的一项实验结果实际上恰好相反——它支持我的理论！ That 1995 Psychological Review piece you mentioned won the George A. Miller award for an outstanding article in general psychology. There was a certain irony about that? 你提到的1995年那篇《心理学评论》文章荣获了George A. Miller心理学杰出论文奖。这是某种嘲讽吗？ In 1960 I was a graduate student in the Department of Psychology at Harvard. One day I got a letter saying that the Department had decided to kick me out of their PhD programme. They doubted I would ever make a worthwhile contribution to psychology, the letter said, due to my lack of ‘originality and independence’. The letter was signed by the acting chairman of the Department, George A. Miller! 1960年，我是哈佛大学心理学系研究生。有一天，我收到一封信，说系里已经决定把我排除在博士项目之外。信中说，由于我缺乏‘原创性和独立性’，他们对我做出有价值的心理学贡献表示怀疑。这封信正是由代理系主席George A. Miller签署的！ Sometimes, when life hands you a lemon, you should just bite in. Getting kicked out of Harvard was a devastating blow at the time, but in retrospect, it was the best thing that Harvard ever did for me. It freed me from the influence of ‘experts’. It kept me from being indoctrinated. Many years later, it enabled me to write The Nurture Assumption. 有时，当生活递给你一个柠檬时，你就应该咬它。当时被踢出哈佛是一个毁灭性打击，但现在回想起来，这是哈佛为我所做过的最好的事情。这让我从‘专家’的影响解脱出来。让我不被灌输。许多年以后，让我写出《教养的迷思》。 （编辑：辉格@whigzhou） *注：本译文未经原作者授权，本站对原文不持有也不主张任何权利，如果你恰好对原文拥有权益并希望我们移除相关内容，请私信联系，我们会立即作出响应。

——海德沙龙·翻译组，致力于将英文世界的好文章搬进中文世界——

Sex on TV: Less impact on teens than you might think 电视上的色情内容: 对青少年的影响比你想象的少 作者:Christopher Ferguson @ 2016-08-02 译者:babyface_claire(@许你疯不许你傻) 校对:鳗鱼禅(@鳗鱼禅) 来源:https://theconversation.com/sex-on-tv-less-impact-on-teens-than-you-might-think-61957 Few people would doubt that sex is ubiquitous in media – whether movies, television, music or books – and that teens today have unprecedented access to all of it. It’s often taken for granted that this easy access to “sexy media” has an influence on teenage sexuality. 性在媒体上无处不在，这个论断少有人质疑。无论电影、电视、音乐或书籍，对当今的青少年而言，有关性的一切信息触手可及，这种便捷史无前例。人们经常理所当然的认为，随处可见的“色情媒体”会对青少年性行为产生影响。 Specifically, the worry is that teens may have sex earlier or engage in higher-risk sexual activities such as having multiple partners or exposing themselves to potential pregnancies or STDs. In 2010 the American Academy of Pediatrics even published a position paper claiming that sexually explicit media could promote risky teen sexual behavior. 具体来说，人们担心的是青少年可能更早发生性行为，或者参与高风险性行为。比如与多位同伴有性行为，或者暴露于怀孕或染上性病的风险中。2010年美国儿科协会甚至发表了一篇意见书，声称色情媒体可能诱发青少年危险性行为。 But government data find that teens are actually waiting longer than in the past to have sex. And teen pregnancy rates are at historic lows. How is it possible that sexy media has such a pernicious effect even as teen sexuality is becoming healthier? 然而政府数据显示，事实上青少年发生性行为前的等待时间比过去更长。且现时未成年人怀孕率处于历史最低点。色情媒体如此有害，而青少年性行为反而比以往健康，这怎么可能呢？ I’ve spent more than a decade researching how media – like video games or advertising – influences youth behavior. What fascinates me is how society interacts with media, often embracing salacious content while simultaneously blaming it for societal problems, whether real or imagined. 我花了超过十年的时间研究视频游戏和广告之类的媒体如何影响青少年行为。让我着迷的是，社会如何与媒体相互作用。媒体经常热衷于色情内容，同时却将之归咎于真实或假想中的社会问题。 So my colleagues and I decided to look at the research on sexy media and teenage sexual behavior to see how the strong the link between the two is. 于是我和我的同事们决定研究色情媒体和青少年性行为的关系，看看这两者之间的相关性有多高。 Sexy media doesn’t predict sexual behavior 色情媒体不是性行为的有效预测变量 Despite the common assumptions about sex in the media and its alleged effects on teens, the evidence behind the link is weak. Some studies find evidence for a small effect (perhaps in some circumstances but not others), while others find no evidence for any effect. 尽管人们声称媒体上的性信息会影响青少年，这个受到普遍认同的假设前提并未得到多少证据支持。有些研究发现了微弱效应存在的证据（可能在某些情形下有相关性，其它情形下没有），然而另一些研究没有发现存在任何影响的证据。 One reason the evidence may not be conclusive is that there are practical and ethical limitations to conducting research. We can’t run experiments where teens watch different TV shows and we wait around to see who has sex. This means research often relies on self-reported data. What we do is ask teens to report on their sexual behavior and their media preferences, as well as other variables we might like to control for (such as personality or family environment) and see if correlations exist. 证据可能不够有说服力的原因之一是，开展此类研究有操作上的和伦理上的限制。我们不能在青少年观看不同电视节目的地方进行实验，并且在周围等待，看谁发生了性行为。这意味着研究经常依赖自我报告的数据。我们所做的是，让青少年报告他们的性行为和偏好的媒体，以及我们可能想控制的其它变量（比如性格和家庭环境），来看是否存在相关性。 With this in mind, my colleagues Patrick Markey at Villanova and Danish researcher Rune Nielsen and I conducted a meta-analysis of 22 studies with over 22,000 participants that examine the correlation between sexy media and teenage sexual behavior. A meta-analysis lets us look for commonalities in the results, and is something that had not been done previously with this pool of research. 出于这种考虑，我和在维拉诺瓦的同事Patrick Markey，还有丹麦研究员Rune Nielsen进行了一项对22个研究，包含超过2.2万参与者的荟萃分析，来检验色情媒体和青少年性行为之间的相关性。这个荟萃分析让我们寻找已有研究结果中的共性，这批研究此前未做过荟萃分析。 All of the studies in the meta-analysis looked at depictions of sexual situations, nudity, partial nudity or explicit discussions of sex in television shows or movies easily accessible to minors (and thus excluded pornography). 这次荟萃分析里的研究都着眼于电视节目上对行为情景的描述、裸露、部分裸露或者公开讨论的性内容, 或者容易被未成年人接触到的电影 （因此排除了色情文学）。 In particular, we were curious to see whether sexy media predicted teen sexual behavior once other variables had been controlled. For instance, maybe boys tend to watch sexier media and also are more sexually risk-taking. Or perhaps youth who are more liberal in terms of personality are more open both to sexy media and earlier sexual initiation. Perhaps a difficult family background is the underlying key to understanding any correlation between media use habits and actual sexual behavior. 我们特别好奇的是，一旦其它变量受到控制，色情媒体接触行为能否预测青少年性行为。例如，可能男孩更倾向于观看更色情的媒体内容，并且愿意承担更多的性风险。或者有更自由人格的青少年更易于接受色情媒体和早期性启蒙。也许一个复杂的家庭背景是理解媒体使用习惯和实际性行为相关性背后的关键。 Ultimately, this is what we found. Once other factors such as family environment, personality or even gender were controlled, sexy media exposure did not meaningfully correlate with teen sexual behavior. 最后，这是我们的发现。一旦其它因素，比如家庭环境、性格甚至性别都受到控制，色情媒体的曝光与青少年性行为没有显著的相关。 Contrary to common fears, sexy media doesn’t seem to have any practical significance for when teens first have sex or start other sexual behaviors. This lack of correlation is a warning sign we might be on the wrong track in trying to blame media for teen sexual risk-taking. 与常见的恐惧相反，色情媒体内容似乎对青少年首次性行为或者进行其它性接触的时间没有任何实际影响。缺乏相关性是一个警告信号，我们将青少年冒险的性行为归咎于媒体的观点可能是错误的。 Why doesn’t media influence teens? 为什么媒体内容影响不了青少年？ There are numerous theories that discuss how individuals and media interact. However, many older media effects theories didn’t consider why people were drawn to media, how they processed it, or what they hoped to get from it. Such theories assumed viewers simply irrationally and purposelessly imitated what they saw. Most of the papers we examined in our meta-analysis were tests of these basic, automatic, media effects theories. 有很多理论讨论个人和媒体如何相互影响。然而，许多早期媒体效应理论没有考虑为什么人们被媒体内容吸引，他们如何处理媒体内容，或者他们想从媒体内容中得到什么。这些理论假设观众只是简单非理性和无目的地模仿他们观看的内容。我们荟萃分析里的大多数论文就是这些基本、自动的媒体效应理论的实验测试。 In the past few years, some scholars (myself included) have specifically called for the retirement of these older media effects theories. This is because the evidence increasingly suggests that fictional media such as feature movies or sitcoms media is too remote to have a clear impact on consumers' behavior, especially compared to families and peers. 过去几年，一些学者（包括我自己）号召淘汰这些早期媒体效应理论。越来越多的证据表明，像故事电影和情景喜剧这样的虚构媒体内容太遥不可及，不足以对消费者的行为产生清晰明确的影响，尤其是与家庭和同龄人这两个因素相比。 In addition, emerging evidence suggests that young children process fictional media differently from real events. If small children are able to process a difference between fictional events and real events, we can assume that teens don’t really expect media to reflect reality. 此外，新出现的证据表明，年轻的孩子处理虚构媒体的方式不同于真实事件。如果小孩子都能够辨别虚构事件和真实事件之间的差异，我们可以假设青少年从来没有真正想过媒体反映了现实。 Our results regarding the limited impact of media also fit with the observations from societal data. Despite a plethora of sexual media available to teens, a crisis of risky teen sexual behavior has not emerged. 我们关于媒体有限影响的研究结果也符合来自社会数据的观察。尽管青少年接触到种类繁多的色情媒体，高风险青少年性行为的危机并没有出现。 We watch what we’re interested in watching 我们观看我们感兴趣的 Newer models of media use suggest that it is the individuals who consume media, not the media itself, who are the driving agents of behavior. Evidence suggests that users seek out and interpret media according to what they want to get from it, rather than passively imitating it. 较新的媒体使用模型表明，是消费媒体内容的个人而不是媒体本身，驱动了行为。有证据表明，用户根据他们想要从中得到什么来寻找和解读媒体，而不是被动的模仿。 People don’t generally accidentally watch media, sexual or otherwise, but are motivated to do so because of preexisting desires. 人们通常不是偶然地观看媒体、性或者其它，而是被先前存在的欲望驱动。 For instance, some recent studies have indicated that youth seek out media that fit with preexisting motives, called a selection effect, but that media don’t necessarily lead to further problem behaviors. For example, research suggests that some teens who are already aggressive might be interested in violent video games, but playing such games doesn’t make kids more aggressive. 例如，最近的一些研究显示青年人寻求适合先前已经存在的动机的媒体，这被称为“选择效应”。但是媒体并不一定导致进一步的问题行为。比如，研究表明一些本来就已经好斗的青年人可能对暴力视频游戏感兴趣，但玩这样的游戏并没有让孩子更好斗。 That’s a point that sometimes seems ignored when we talk about teens and sex. Interest in sex is a largely biologically motivated process; fictional media really isn’t required. Teens will become interested in sex all on their own. 这就是当我们谈论青少年与性时，有时候会忽略的一点。对性的兴趣很大程度上是生物性驱动的过程，虚构媒体并非必需。青少年自发的对性产生兴趣。 Parents have more influence than the media 父母比媒体影响更大 Parents can rest a bit easier since the evidence suggests that media isn’t a primary driver of teen sexuality. 父母们可以松口气了，因为证据表明媒体不是一个青少年性行为的主要驱动力。 To the extent media has any impact at all, it is likely only in a vacuum left by adults reluctant to talk to kids about sex, especially the stuff kids really want to know. 即便媒体能施加影响，也只是在一个由成人所留下的真空内起作用，有些成人不愿意跟孩子谈论与性有关的话题，尤其是孩子真正想知道的事情，由此便产生了真空。 How do you ask someone out on a date and how do you handle it if they say no? What does sex feel like? When is it OK to have sex? What are the risks and how do you avoid them? In the face of patient, empathic and informative discussions about sex by adults kids trust, the media likely has little influence. 你怎么邀请别人出去约会？如果他们拒绝了，你怎么处理？性爱是怎么样的？什么时候可以发生性行为？性行为有什么风险，你怎么避免这些风险？在成人与孩子之间互相信任、耐心、有同理心和有理有据的讨论面前，媒体可能几乎没有影响。 Ultimately, whether media have salacious or more conscientious portrayals of sexuality, we should not expect media to replace conversations with youth by parents, guardians and educators. 最后，无论媒体是否有露骨或更谨慎的性描写，我们都不应期待媒体取代父母、监护人和教育工作者与青少年的谈话。 I’m not suggesting everyone run out and buy “50 Shades of Grey” for their teen, but if teens happen to come across it (and they will), it’s not the end of the world. 我不是建议每个人都跑出去买《五十度灰》给他们的小孩，但是如果青少年无意中发现这本书（他们肯定会），这不是世界末日。 The important thing for parents is to talk to their kids. 作为父母，重要的是和他们的孩子谈一谈。 （编辑：辉格@whigzhou） *注：本译文未经原作者授权，本站对原文不持有也不主张任何权利，如果你恰好对原文拥有权益并希望我们移除相关内容，请私信联系，我们会立即作出响应。

——海德沙龙·翻译组，致力于将英文世界的好文章搬进中文世界——

Political Animals by Rick Shenkman: why we shoot our democracies in the foot Rick Shenkman新书《政治动物》：为什么我们会搬起石头砸民主的脚 作者:Olivia Archdeacon @ 2016-01-22 译者:babyface_claire(@许你疯不许你傻) 校对:沈沉(@你在何地-sxy) 来源:CapX,http://capx.co/political-animals/ Best-selling historian and Emmy award-winning investigative reporter Rick Shenkman is back. He explains in the latest of his seven books, Political Animals – How our Stone-Age Brain Gets in the Way of Smart Politics, that despite our species’ pride of rational thinking, our world is anything but rational. 畅销历史书作家和艾美奖调查记者获得者Rick Shenkman回来了。他在最新的第七本书《政治动物：石器时代的大脑如何妨碍政治精明》里解释到，尽管我们人类以理性思考为傲，但是世界却一点也不合理。 Like economists, political scientists base their models on rational choice, and do not want to think that a one off event like a shark attack can have a significant effect on voting. Yet it has been proven time and again that when times are bad, people vote against the incumbents. If a meteor hit Arizona, they’d vote against the incumbents. Extraneous forces have political consequences. Unfortunately for politicians, this is especially the case when the effect is negative. 像经济学者一样，政治学者以理性选择为基础建构其模型，并且不愿意认为一件像鲨鱼攻击这样的一次性事件可以对投票结果产生重大影响。然而事实一次又一次证明，一旦碰上光景不好，人们就会投票反对当权者。如果有陨石击中亚利桑那州，他们会投票反对当权者。外来力量能够造成政治后果。 不幸的是，对政治家而言，如果这种影响是负面的，情况更是如此。 Readers of Shenkman’s previous book, ‘Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the truth about the American voter’ may be reluctant to pick up another anthology of painfully embarrassing truths about the general public of the world’s most powerful economy. But they should be reassured that Political Animals is a forgiving, empathetic and motivational read. 读过Shenkman上本书《我们是多么愚蠢？正视美国选民的真相》的人，可能不愿再读一本关于世界最大经济体的一般公众的痛苦尴尬真相的汇编。但是我可以向他们保证，《政治动物》是一本宽容、体贴且激励人心的读物。 It is tough love, however. Shenkman points out that despite the human brain being packed with eighty-six billion neurons – making human beings smarter than the smartest computer that ever existed (yet) – when it comes to politics, the public is very easily fooled. What is more alarming is that we’re fooling ourselves. We cannot blame the politicians or the Illuminati. 然而，这是严厉的爱。Shenkman指出，尽管人类的大脑挤满了860亿个神经细胞（使人类比迄今为止最聪明的电脑更加聪明），可是一旦涉及政治，公众却非常容易被欺骗。更令人担忧的是，是我们自己在欺骗自己。我们不能把责任推给政治家或“光照派”。 “We often lie about out reasons for doing what we do in politics. We don’t just lie to others, we lie to ourselves. Therefore we can only detect what people are thinking when we study patterns of behaviour in groups.” “我们经常会在我们政治行为的缘由方面撒谎。我们不止对别人撒谎，我们对自己也撒谎。因此，我们只能通过研究群体的行为模式来检测人们在想什么。” Shenkman’s genuine passion for his subject matter shines through. As much as we rationalise our actions in hindsight, we’re not in a position to truly know ourselves seeing as so much of what happens in our brain happens outside of conscious awareness. So attempting to understand why people vote the way they do simply by asking them will get us nowhere. We need science. Shenkman 对他的研究主题闪耀着真正的热情。我们会在事后尽力合理化自己的行为，鉴于大脑中发生的大量事情处于我们的自觉意识之外，我们就处在一个不能真正了解自己的境地。所以，只是追问人们为什么如此这般投票，对我们理解这一问题毫无益处。我们需要科学。 Political Animals does this. It uses breakthroughs in neuroscience, genetics, evolutionary psychology, anthropology, behavioural economics, political science, political psychology and game theory to give new insights into political behaviour. 《政治动物》要做的就是这件事。它利用了神经科学、遗传学、进化心理学、人类学、行为经济学、政治科学、政治心理学和博弈论等学科的新突破，寻求对于政治行为的新见解。 The basic premise of the book is that our brain evolved roughly 1.8 million years ago and so the instincts that were baked into human DNA then are now often not the most appropriate or efficient response to our environment: “In politics, [instincts] often don’t work: they malfunction, misfire and lead us astray.” Shenkman even goes as far as to argue that “when it comes to politics, the times when we can unquestioningly go with our instincts is almost nil.” 这本书的基本前提是：我们的大脑大约在180万年前进化形成，因此那些整合到人类DNA中的本能通常并非我们对环境所能做出的最合适或最有效反应。“在政治中，[直觉]通常不可行，他们会失灵，无法奏效，还会带我们误入歧途。” Shenkman走得很远，他甚至认为，“当谈到政治时，我们可以毫无疑问的跟随直觉走的时候基本为零”。 In essence: we frequently sabotage ourselves, upending democracy in ways none of us intended. 从本质上说，我们经常会在没有人刻意如此的情况下伤害自己、颠覆民主。 Shenkman focuses on four problems that we continually make: political apathy; failure to correctly size up our political leaders; a habit of punishing politicians who tell us the hard truths we don’t want to hear; and our failure to show empathy in situations that clearly demand it. Shenkman关注我们经常犯的四个错误：政治冷漠，不能正确地认识政治领袖，习惯性地惩罚跟我们讲述我们不愿意听的残酷事实的政治家，在明确需要的情况下不能表示同情。 Hearing all of this, it is sorely tempting to conclude that democracy is hopeless. But all is not lost. 听到这一切，让人很容易得出结论，民主是无望的。但这并不意味着一切。 Throughout the book we are reminded that the way our brain is constructed does not mean we are fated to behave as cavemen, even though we might be inclined to think that based on the morning’s headlines. He shows us with numerous thought experiments (that readers can conduct on themselves) that is better to think of our brains as being pre-wired rather than hard-wired. We have certain innate traits but whether they determine how we behave in a particular situation depends on a range of factors. This shouldn’t be so surprising – think how easily and dramatically our energy levels can affect our decision making and self-control. 这本书从头到尾一直在提醒我们，我们的大脑如此构造，并不意味着我们注定要像穴居人那样行动，尽管根据早上的头条新闻我们可能倾向于这样认为。他通过许多思想实验（读者可以自己进行）向我们表明，我们最好将大脑看作是预设的而并非是固设的。我们有某些天生的特质, 但这些特质是否会决定我们在特定情况下的行为则取决于一系列因素。这并不应该让人感到惊讶——想想我们的精力水平能如何容易、如何显著地影响我们的决策和自控能力吧。 What is more controversial is Shenkman’s challenge to the convention that the main political problem society faces is a lack of information: “Modern Platos raise a huge cry over the problem ignorance poses to democracy, turning alarmism about ignorance into a virtual cottage industry” 更有争议的是Shenkman对社会面临的主要政治问题乃是缺乏信息这一传统观念的挑战，“现代柏拉图们大声疾呼，宣称无知威胁民主。他们已经把对无知的担忧警惕几乎变成了一种祖传家酿。” And he’s right – critics have been beating the same horse for generations, crying ‘mass man is ignorant!’ After the Second World War and the rise of Nazism, university professors became consumed with the problem of public ignorance. It is not that simple, unfortunately. Proving that unknowledgeable voters can be turned into knowledgeable ones doesn’t prove much we didn’t already know. We send children to school because we believe they can learn. The truth is more unsettling: it is not an intelligence or information problem. It’s a motivation, environment, social and, above all else, a human being problem. The problem is that voters on their own don’t try to learn. 他是对的——评论家们世世代代都在鞭打同一具尸体，喊叫“大众是无知的！”第二次世界大战和纳粹主义兴起之后，大学教授们开始全心关注公众无知的问题。不幸的是，这不是那么简单。证明了无知的选民可以转变为有知的选民，这并不能证明多少我们事先就不知道的事情。我们送孩子去学校是因为我们相信他们有学习的能力。真相是更让人不安的：这不是一个智力或者信息问题。这是激励、环境、社会的问题，最重要的是，这是人性问题。问题在于选民们自己不尝试去学习。 Perhaps voters need to be motivated, probably financially. But no government has tried this (directly) because voters would find it insulting – anyone who dared suggest that voters need to be paid because they are citizen delinquents would instantly be branded as elitist. 或许选民需要刺激，比如经济刺激。但是没有任何政府（直接地）试图这么做，因为选民们会感到这是侮辱——任何人若胆敢建议给选民支付费用【编注：从上下文看，意思好像是付费让选民接受公民培训，但也可能是指为投票行为付费。】，而且给出的理由是因为他们是公民群氓，那他立马就会被贴上“精英主义”的标签。 Equally, the Scandinavian experience shows culture can be just as effective (75% of Swedes participate in adult civics-study circles at some point in their lives having retained an interest in politics from school-age). But why should it take either money or culture to get people to perform their civic responsibilities? Shouldn’t people want to be involved? 同样的，北欧的经验表明文化同样奏效 （瑞典人中凡是曾在生活中某一时间参与过成人公民学习圈的，有75%都保留了从学生时代起培养出的政治兴趣）。但是为什么需要钱或者文化的驱使才能让人们履行公民责任呢？难道人们不想参与吗？ So this is not a guidebook for how to be the perfect citizen. Shenkman is far from being an idealist. Instead, he offers un-patronising, concrete steps to ‘do politics’ better: don’t place a lot of confidence in your natural curiosity; don’t delude yourself into believing you can read politics; whenever possible, try to put yourself in a position where you can experience politics directly. 所以这不是一本怎样成为完美公民的指南。Shenkman远非一个理想主义者。相反，他提出的是并不高高在上的、具体的步骤，来更好地“做政治”：不要过分信赖你天生的好奇心上；不要欺骗自己说你可以读懂政治；有可能的话，尝试坐到某个位置上，直接体验政治。 In this engaging, illuminating and often humourous portrait of our political culture, Shenkman probes the depths of the human mind to reveal what we must do to fix our floundering democracy, and to become more political, less animal. 在这幅引人入胜、发人深省且常常带些幽默的政治文化肖像中, Shenkman窥探到人类心灵的深处，告诉我们必须做什么来修复我们挣扎的民主，多一些政治性, 少一些动物性。 Political Animals was first published on the 21st January 2016 by Basic Books, £17.99 RRP, hardback. 《政治动物》由基本图书公司在2016年1月21日首次出版，精装版标价£17.99 。 （编辑：辉格@whigzhou） *注：本译文未经原作者授权，本站对原文不持有也不主张任何权利，如果你恰好对原文拥有权益并希望我们移除相关内容，请私信联系，我们会立即作出响应。

——海德沙龙·翻译组，致力于将英文世界的好文章搬进中文世界——

Sorry, You Can’t Speed Read 抱歉，你无法速读 作者:Jeffrey M. Zacks, Rebecca Treiman @ 2016-4-15 译者:焦美淳(@火车入巷) 校对:Drunkplane (@Drunkplane-zny) 来源:纽约时报,http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/opinion/sunday/sorry-you-cant-speed-read.html OUR favorite Woody Allen joke is the one about taking a speed-reading course. “I read ‘War and Peace’ in 20 minutes,” he says. “It’s about Russia.” 关于速读，伍迪艾伦讲过一个我们非常喜欢的笑话：“我20分钟就看完了《战争与和平》，”他说，“讲苏联的。” The promise of speed reading — to absorb text several times faster than normal, without any significant loss of comprehension — can indeed seem too good to be true. Nonetheless, it has long been an aspiration for many readers, as well as the entrepreneurs seeking to serve them. And as the production rate for new reading matter has increased, and people read on a growing array of devices, the lure of speed reading has only grown stronger. 速读的美好愿望——即在不错失原文主旨的情况下，以几倍于寻常的速度理解文章内容——看起来并不易达成。然而，对很多读者来说，这确是梦寐已久的美事，一些企业家也一直试图在这方面为读者提供一些服务。由于读物的出版速度越来越快，并且阅读设备越来越多，速读的诱惑力只增不减。 The first popular speed-reading course, introduced in 1959 by Evelyn Wood, was predicated on the idea that reading was slow because it was inefficient. The course focused on teaching people to make fewer back-and-forth eye movements across the page, taking in more information with each glance. Today, apps like SpeedRead With Spritz aim to minimize eye movement even further by having a digital device present you with a stream of single words one after the other at a rapid rate. 第一个著名的速读课程在1959年由伊芙琳伍德所创建。它基于这一概念——阅读之所以缓慢是因为其效率低下。这个课程着眼于教导人们阅读书页时，眼睛尽可能少的左右往返运动，而要让眼睛每扫过一次都获取更多的信息。如今，像SpeedRead With Spritz这样的app，甚至通过在电子设备上快速滚动一个个的单词，来减少眼球的活动。 Unfortunately, the scientific consensus suggests that such enterprises should be viewed with suspicion. In a recent article in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, one of us (Professor Treiman) and colleagues reviewed the empirical literature on reading and concluded that it’s extremely unlikely you can greatly improve your reading speed without missing out on a lot of meaning. 遗憾的是，科学共识显示，我们须抱有怀疑的眼光来看待这番速读事业。在一篇最近发表于《大众心理学期刊》的文章中，Treiman教授和她的同事回顾了有关阅读的实证文献，并得出一个结论：在不大量错失文章原意的情况下，你基本不可能显著地提高阅读速度。 Certainly, readers are capable of rapidly scanning a text to find a specific word or piece of information, or to pick up a general idea of what the text is about. But this is skimming, not reading. We can definitely skim, and it may be that speed-reading systems help people skim better. 当然，阅读者确实能够通过迅速地扫视，从一段文本中提取到特定词语或者信息片段，亦或摘取出这段文字的中心思想。但这是浏览，不是阅读。我们肯定可以做到浏览，或许速读体系有助于促进浏览的效果。 Some speed-reading systems, for example, instruct people to focus only on the beginnings of paragraphs and chapters. This is probably a good skimming strategy. Participants in a 2009 experiment read essays that had half the words covered up — either the beginning of the essay, the end of the essay, or the beginning or end of each individual paragraph. Reading half-paragraphs led to better performance on a test of memory for the passage’s meaning than did reading only the first or second half of the text, and it worked as well as skimming under time pressure. 举例而言，一些速读系统指导人们只在文段或者章节的开端加以关注。这或许是一个很好的浏览策略。在2009年的一个实验中，参与者阅读盖住一半内容的文章——或前半篇，或后半篇，或每段的开头或结尾。阅读每个段落的一半，相比于阅读前半或后半篇文章，对全文意思的记忆效果更好。并且，其效果等同于在时间紧张情况下的浏览。 But speed reading? Techniques that aim to guide eye movements so that we can take in more information from each glance seem doomed to fail. There is only a small area in the retina (called the fovea) for which our visual acuity is very high. Our eyes are seriously limited in their precision outside of that. This means that we can take in only a word or so at each glance, as well as a little bit about the words on either side. In fact, since the 1960s, experiments have repeatedly confirmed that when people “speed read,” they simply do not comprehend the parts of the text that their eyes skip over. 但有速读这回事吗？一些技巧旨在指导我们眼球的活动，以便眼睛一瞥就能获得更多的信息，但它们似乎注定失败。只有在视网膜上很小的一块区域（称作中央凹），我们的视觉敏锐度才非常高。而除了它之外，我们的眼睛在精确度上非常受限。这就意味着我们每次只能看清一个词，顶多再看到它旁边个把词。事实上，自从1960年代起，很多实验都验证了当人们“速读”的时候，他们并不理解他们眼睛扫视过的那部分内容。 A deeper problem, however — and the one that also threatens the new speed-reading apps — is that the big bottleneck in reading isn’t perception (seeing the words) but language processing (assembling strings of words into meanings). Have you ever tried listening to an audio recording with the speaking rate dialed way up? Doubling the speed, in our experience, leaves individual words perfectly identifiable — but makes it just about impossible to follow the meaning. The same phenomenon occurs with written text. 然而我们还有一个更深层次的问题——这个问题也威胁着那些新兴的速读软件——阅读中最大的瓶颈并不是感知（看到词语），而是语言处理（组合词语使其有意义）。你是否尝试过以极快的速度听录音？在我们的经验里，录音速度被增加一倍后，每一个单词都可以听清，但我们却恰恰跟不上它的意思。这种现象也同样出现在阅读纸质内容时。 As in all forms of human behavior, there is a trade-off, in reading, between speed and accuracy. You can learn to skim strategically so that you spend more time looking where the more important words are likely to be, and if the words are presented in a stream you may be able to learn which words to focus on and which to ignore. However, that does not mean that you can somehow magically read parts of a page that you don’t look at, or process all the words in a superfast sequence. 在各种人类行为中，总有取舍。阅读时，取舍就体现在速度和准确度上。你可以学习策略性地浏览，以便在可能出现更重要词语的地方花费更多时间。如果词语在眼前滚动，你能够知道哪些词需要重视，哪些词可以忽略。然而，这并不意味着你可以不看某一页的部分内容，就神奇地阅读了它；也不意味着你能以极快的速度处理所有的词。 Reading is about language comprehension, not visual ability. If you want to improve your reading speed, your best bet — as old-fashioned as it sounds — is to read a wide variety of written material and to expand your vocabulary. 阅读关乎语言的理解，而不是视觉能力。如果你想提高你的阅读速度，你最好的方法——这听起来有点老掉牙——是阅读大量文字资料并且扩充你的词汇库。 Just don’t expect to read “War and Peace” in 20 minutes. 真的别指望在20分钟里读完《战争与和平》。 Jeffrey M. Zacks, the author of “Flicker: Your Brain on Movies,” and Rebecca Treiman are professors of psychological and brain sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. Jeffrey M. Zacks（著有《闪光：看电影的大脑》（Flicker：You Brain on Movies））和Rebecca Treiman，皆为圣路易斯华盛顿大学心理和大脑科学教授。 （编辑：辉格@whigzhou） *注：本译文未经原作者授权，本站对原文不持有也不主张任何权利，如果你恰好对原文拥有权益并希望我们移除相关内容，请私信联系，我们会立即作出响应。

——海德沙龙·翻译组，致力于将英文世界的好文章搬进中文世界——

Beyond the 10,000-hour-rule: Experts disagree about the value of practice 一万小时理论的背后：专家并不认同练习的价值 作者：Kevin Hartnett @ 2016-3-27 译者：黑色枪骑兵（@忠勇仁义诚实可靠小郎君） 校对：babyface_claire（@许你疯不许你傻） 来源：The Boston Globe，http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2016/03/26/beyond-hour-rule-experts-disagree-about-value-practice/jYrsmvBqFqdddVa3lKDGnO/story.html IN RECENT YEARS, it’s become a matter of conventional wisdom that if you want to get good at something, you have to practice. A lot. There’s always been some intuitive truth to this idea, but it gained greater influence after the 2008 publication of Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller “Outliers,” which presented research suggesting that the best people in a field got there because they practiced longer and harder than everyone else. 近年来，“如果你想要变得擅长某事，你就必须大量练习”俨然已成共识。支持这种观点的直觉性事实有很多，但是在2008年马尔科姆·格拉德维尔的畅销书《异类》出版之后，这种观点变得更有影响力了。书中说，研究表明，领域内最优秀的人才之所以优秀，是因为他们比其他人练习得更多更努力。 Among researchers, however, the importance of practice for achievement remains an open and hotly debated question. In particular, a group of researchers argues in a recently published book chapter and a forthcoming paper in Perspectives on Psychological Sciences that the importance of practice has been wildly overstated. 然而在研究人员中，练习对于成功的价值依然是被公开热烈争论的问题。尤其是一组研究者在他们最近出版的著作的一章中，和即将在《心理科学展望》发表的一篇论文中表示：练习的重要性被过分高估了。 “It’s just not scientifically defensible at this point to say that training history does or could explain all the variation [in talent],” says Brooke Macnamara, a psychologist at Case Western Reserve University. “训练经历能够或者可能能够解释（才能上的）所有差异这种观点从科学角度看是站不住脚的，”凯斯西储大学心理学家Macnamara表示。 Macnamara is coauthor of the book chapter, published earlier this year in “The Psychology of Learning and Motivation,” and the forthcoming study. This work follows 2014 research in which she and her coauthors performed a meta-analysis on thousands of studies on skill acquisition in order to estimate exactly how much practice matters in different pursuits. They found that how much a person practices explains about 26 percent of the variation in how good people are at games like chess, 21 percent of the variation in performance playing musical instruments, and 18 percent of the variation in performance in sports. Macnamara是今年早些时候出版的《学习与动机的心理学》一书的专章和上述即将发表的研究的合著者。这项研究紧随2014年的一项研究，在前一项研究中，她与合作者对数千份针对技能习得的研究进行了荟萃分析，以期精确估计练习在不同的消遣活动中占了多少比重。他们发现练习量能够解释博弈游戏（比如象棋）的能力差异的26%，乐器演奏的21%，以及体育运动的18%。 “Our conclusion is that, of course, deliberate practice is an important factor, but it’s not the only factor or even the largest factor,” says coauthor David Hambrick, a psychologist at Michigan State University. “我们的结论是：刻意练习是一项重要的因素，但是这并不是唯一的因素，甚至连最大的因素都算不上，”合著者之一，密歇根州立大学心理学家David Hambrick表示。 Hambrick and Macnamara’s work is a rejoinder to research by Anders Ericsson, a psychologist at Florida State University and the person most famously identified with the view that the right kind of practice makes all the difference. Ericsson’s research played a starring role in “Outliers,” the book that gave birth to the now famous “10,000-hour rule,” which says that elite performance hinges on practicing the correct way for that amount of time. Hambrick和Macnamara的研究是对弗罗里达州立大学心理学家Anders Ericsson的反驳，后者以“恰当类型的训练决定一切”这一观点之化身而出名。Ericsson的研究在提出了著名的“10000小时理论”的《异类》中扮演主要角色。该理论认为优异的表现取决于用正确的方式练习足够长时间。 Ericsson says Gladwell misstated his research and that he never specifies any amount of practice time as a magic threshold. He takes issue with the 10,000-hour rule in his new book, “PEAK: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise,” due out in April. Ericsson表示Gladwell 错误解读了他的研究，他从未把任何特定数量的练习时间划定为神奇界限。他在四月即将出炉的新书《巅峰：专业技能新科学的奥秘》中对10000小时理论提出了异议。 More generally, he argues that Hambrick and Macnamara’s research underrepresents the value of practice because it counts training activities that fall short of the kind of focused, deliberate practice that underpins his research. As he sees it, to really make a difference, practice has to be undertaken with the specific goal of improving an aspect of performance and under the supervision of a coach or mentor who can provide skilled feedback. 更一般而言，他认为Hambrick和Macnamara的研究低估了练习的价值，因为这项研究所统计的练习行为缺少专注的、刻意的练习，而这正是支撑他的研究的关键。他认为，如果想要有所成效，练习必须有明确的提升某方面表现的目标，并且在教练或者导师等能提供专业反馈的人的监督下进行。 “Critics have tried to put us into this mindless repetition idea here, and that completely misunderstands [my] view,” he says. “We find that the expert is engaging in this search for finding the best ways of performing and then constantly seeking feedback about where they’re performing suboptimally.” “批评者们试图把我们的想法解释为愚蠢的重复，这完全误解了我的观点，”他表示，“我们发现，专家会致力于寻找最佳执行方式并就何处表现未达最优持续谋求反馈。 Ericsson grants that practice is not necessarily everything. He argues that some physical characteristics and personality traits do influence the development of talent — it helps to be tall to play basketball, and people with the right disposition may be better able to able to sustain hours of deliberate practice. Still, Ericsson continues to view practice as far and away the factor that explains differences in ultimate talent. Ericsson认同练习不意味着所有。他认为某些身体特性和性格特征确实会影响才能的发展——长得高对打篮球有帮助，有良好性格的人可能更能承受数小时的刻意练习。Ericsson仍然把练习看作解释才能之最终差异的最重要因素。 “Lacking evidence about what some people actually lack in order to achieve at this very high level, wouldn’t you as a scientist have to say we don’t know?” Ericsson says. “And if we don’t know, let’s not go around saying it’s obvious that some people are able to and others are not.” “为了达到相当高的水准，人们真正缺乏的是什么，这个问题一直缺少证据，难道作为一名科学家不应该必须说我们不知道吗？”Ericsson表示“如果不知道的话，我们就不要四处散播说什么很明显有人行而其他人不行这类说法。” Others in the field are less convinced. 这一领域内的其他专家对此不是很信服。 “I wouldn’t expect that if my kids got 10,000 hours of piano playing, they’d become professional piano players,” says Jonathan Wai, a visiting researcher at Case Western Reserve University and research scientist at the Duke University Talent Identification Program. “It doesn’t take away from the idea that practice is important, but it does take away from the idea that anyone can be anything.” “我并不期待我的孩子在练习弹奏钢琴10000小时之后成为专业的钢琴演奏家，”凯斯西储大学访问学者，杜克大学才能鉴别项目研究科学家Jonathan Wai表示。“这并不会贬低练习的重要性，但是这会削弱任何人能做成任何事这类观点。“ If practice isn’t everything, the next step is to nail down what else matters, and that’s where a number of researchers have turned in recent years. 如果练习并不意味着全部，那么下一步就是明确是何种其他因素产生影响，这正是一批研究人员近年来所转向的方面。 The answer, Hambrick and Macnamara suggest, is likely to be nuanced. They argue it’s time to get beyond the idea that talent is either “born” (genetic) or “made” (all about practice). Instead they propose what they call a “multifactorial” model. It features arrows going all over the place in an effort to capture how factors like basic ability, personality, and deliberate practice affect each other and the overall development of talent. Hambrick和Macnamara给出的答案相当微妙。他们认为是时候跳过才能究竟是天生（遗传）或者造就（只关乎练习）这种观点了。取而代之的是他们称之为“多因子”的模型。该模型的特征是全方位探索，试图捕捉到诸如基础能力、个性、刻意练习等因素如何互相影响以及对才能整体发展的影响。 If this revised picture of talent acquisition is complicated, it implies at least one simple message: While practice may make perfect, perfect is probably off the table already for most people in most tasks. 如果这幅改进版的才能习得图景有一天能完成，那么至少能表明一个简单的信息：虽然练习能造就完美，但是对于绝大多数人来说，在绝大多数任务中，“完美”这个概念没有讨论的必要。 （编辑：辉格@whigzhou） *注：本译文未经原作者授权，本站对原文不持有也不主张任何权利，如果你恰好对原文拥有权益并希望我们移除相关内容，请私信联系，我们会立即作出响应。

——海德沙龙·翻译组，致力于将英文世界的好文章搬进中文世界——

【2016-05-29】 @whigzhou: 依我的经验，当秋天气温从30度逐渐降至20度时，所穿的衣服从F30减至F20，当春天气温从10度逐渐升至20度时，所穿的衣服从S10增至S20，F20<S20，此为穿衣-气温函数之非对称性。 @whigzhou: 类似的，个人对某些商品的消费-价格函数也是非对称的，但方向相反，当初夏西瓜从5块1斤逐渐降至3块1斤时，你可能觉得，啊，好便宜，买一个，当秋天西瓜从1块1斤逐渐涨至3块一斤时，你可能觉得，啊，好贵，不吃了。  

Why you probably hate the sound of your own voice 为什么你可能会讨厌自己的声音 作者:Rachel Feltman @ 2015-6-16 译者:Marcel ZHANG(微博:@马赫塞勒张) 校对:沈沉(@你在何地-sxy) 来源:The Washington Post，https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2015/06/16/why-you-probably-hate-the-sound-of-your-own-voice/ Whether you've heard yourself talking on the radio or just gabbing in a friend's Instagram video, you probably know the sound of your own voice -- and chances are pretty good that you hate it. 不论是通过听到自己在广播上讲话,或是在朋友的Instagram视频里闲聊,你可能都已经了解了自己的声音,而且你很可能并不喜欢这个声音｡ As the video above explains, your voice as you hear it when you speak out loud is very different from the voice the rest of the world perceives. That's because it comes to you via a different channel than everyone else. 你在你大声讲话时自己听到的声音跟其他人听到的大不相同｡那是因为声音传播给其他人和传播给你自己所通过的是不同的途径｡ When sound waves from the outside world -- someone else's voice, for example -- hit the outer ear, they're siphoned straight through the ear canal to hit the ear drum, creating vibrations that the brain will translate into sound. 当从外界传来的声波(比如其他人发出的声音)抵达外耳时,鼓膜会直接通过耳道将其接收并产生震动,再由大脑将这些震动转化为声音｡ When we talk, our ear drums and inner ears vibrate from the sound waves we're putting out into the air. But they also have another source of vibration -- the movements caused by the production of the sound. Our vocal cords and airways are trembling, too, and those vibrations make their way over to auditory processing as well. 当我们讲话时,我们的鼓膜和内耳会因我们向空气中发出的声波而产生震动｡但是他们还有其他的震动源,那就是发声时触发的动作｡我们的声带和气道也在颤动,而且这些震动也同样参与到了听觉进程当中｡ Your body is better at carrying low, rich tones than the air is. So when those two sources of sound get combined into one perception of your own voice, it sounds lower and richer. That's why hearing the way your voice sounds without all the body vibes can be off-putting -- it's unfamiliar -- or even unpleasant, because of the relative tininess. 你的身体比空气更容易传递低沉浑厚的声调｡所以,当两种声源合并成为了你对自己声音的感知时,它听起来会相对更加低沉浑厚｡这就是为什么你听到自己没有通过身体共鸣的声音会感到反感､陌生甚至是厌恶了,因为那声音相对更单薄｡ The sound of your own voice isn't the only place where daily perception can butt up against the ugly truth: We often feel uncomfortable when we see our bodies as other people see them, too. 你自己的声音并不是日常认知与丑陋现实针锋相对的唯一情形｡当我们以其他人看我们的方式看到自己的身体时,时常也会觉得有点难受｡ Think about it: Chances are good that most of the times that you look at yourself, it's thanks to a mirror or some other reflective surface. But those are mirror images -- our bodies are flipped. Because most faces are pretty asymmetrical (under close observation, anyway), a flip can create really jarring changes. That's why you might wince at photos that show the real you instead of a mirror image. 大家可以想一下,我们要看到自己,大多数情况基本都要借助镜子或者其他反射面｡但这些都是镜像,我们的身体是经过翻转的｡因为大多数的人脸都是不太对称的(反正在近距离观察下就是这样的),所以一个翻转就能造成令人不快的差别｡这就是为什么你在照片中看到真正的自己而不是镜像时可能会眉头紧蹙了｡ “We see ourselves in the mirror all the time—you brush your teeth, you shave, you put on makeup,” Pamela Rutledge, director of the Media Psychology Center, told The Atlantic. “Looking at yourself in the mirror becomes a firm impression. You have that familiarity. Familiarity breeds liking. You’ve established a preference for that look of your face.” 媒体心理学研究中心(Media Psychology Center)主任帕梅拉·拉特利奇在接受《大西洋月刊》采访时说:“我们时常都会在镜子里看到自己,比如刷牙､剃须和化妆的时候｡故而镜中的自己就变成了一种固定印象｡那么你就会对其产生熟悉感,久而久之这种熟悉感就会催生出喜爱之情,这样一来你便确立了对自己的那种形象的偏爱｡” So it should come as no surprise that being reminded that our faces -- and voices -- are slightly different than we think them to be can be a bit unnerving. 所以,当我们想起来我们的形象和声音与我们印象中的不太一致时,也难怪会感到有点懊恼｡ （编辑：辉格@whigzhou） *注：本译文未经原作者授权，本站对原文不持有也不主张任何权利，如果你恰好对原文拥有权益并希望我们移除相关内容，请私信联系，我们会立即作出响应。

——海德沙龙·翻译组，致力于将英文世界的好文章搬进中文世界——

Does Your Language Shape How You Think? 语言是否塑造了你的思维方式？ 作者：Guy Deutscher @ 2010-8-26 译者：尼克基得慢（@尼克基得慢） 校对：沈沉（@你在何地-sxy） 来源：NYtimes，http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html?_r=0 Seventy years ago, in 1940, a popular science magazine published a short article that set in motion one of the trendiest intellectual fads of the 20th century.At first glance, there seemed little about the article to augur its subsequent celebrity. Neither the title, “Science and Linguistics,” nor the magazine, M.I.T.’s Technology Review, was most people’s idea of glamour. 在七十年前的1940年，一份大众科学杂志发表了一篇短文，开启了二十世纪最新潮的思想风尚之一。乍看这篇文章，很难预料到它之后的名气。无论是文章标题《科学和语言学》，还是刊登的杂志《麻省理工科技评论》，都跟大多数人心目中的魅力不沾边。 And the author, a chemical engineer who worked for an insurance company and moonlighted as an anthropology lecturer at Yale University, was an unlikely candidate for international superstardom. And yet Benjamin Lee Whorf let loose an alluring idea about language’s power over the mind, and his stirring prose seduced a whole generation into believing that our mother tongue restricts what we are able to think. 而且，身为保险公司的化学工程师，同时兼职担任耶鲁大学人类学讲师，作者的这种身份并没有成为国际超级巨星的潜质。然而Benjamin Lee Whorf提出了一种关于语言对思维影响的诱人观点，而且他激动人心的文章诱使整整一代人相信，我们的母语限制了我们所能思考的内容。 In particular, Whorf announced, Native American languages impose on their speakers a picture of reality that is totally different from ours, so their speakers would simply not be able to understand some of our most basic concepts, like the flow of time or the distinction between objects (like “stone”) and actions (like “fall”). 特别是，Whorf宣称，美洲土著语言令它们的使用者形成了与我们完全不同的现实图景，所以美洲土著完全不能理解我们的一些最基本概念，比如时间的流逝，以及物体（比如“石头”）与动作（比如“下落”）的区分。 For decades, Whorf’s theory dazzled both academics and the general public alike. In his shadow, others made a whole range of imaginative claims about the supposed power of language, from the assertion that Native American languages instill in their speakers an intuitive understanding of Einstein’s concept of time as a fourth dimension to the theory that the nature of the Jewish religion was determined by the tense system of ancient Hebrew. 几十年来，学术圈和普罗大众都为Whorf的理论所折服。在他的巨大影响下，其他人基于设想中的语言之威力提出了很多富有想象力的断言，比如断言美洲土著语言赋予了美洲土著对爱因斯坦将时间作为第四维这一观念的直观理解，又如提出犹太教的本质决定于古希伯来语时态系统的理论。 Eventually, Whorf’s theory crash-landed on hard facts and solid common sense, when it transpired that there had never actually been any evidence to support his fantastic claims. The reaction was so severe that for decades, any attempts to explore the influence of the mother tongue on our thoughts were relegated to the loony fringes of disrepute. 最终，当人们发现Whorf的荒诞断言从未有证据支持时，他的理论在坚硬的事实和可靠的常识面前败退了。这一反弹的后果如此严重，以至于数十年里，任何探究母语对于我们思考之影响的尝试都被贬斥为不光彩的疯狂之举。 But 70 years on, it is surely time to put the trauma of Whorf behind us. And in the last few years, new research has revealed that when we learn our mother tongue, we do after all acquire certain habits of thought that shape our experience in significant and often surprising ways. 但是70年过去了，是时候把Whorf造成的不幸放诸脑后了。在过去几年里，新近研究表明，我们在学习母语时确实会养成一些思维习惯，这些习惯会以重要且出乎意料的方式塑造我们的体验。 Whorf, we now know, made many mistakes. The most serious one was to assume that our mother tongue constrains our minds and prevents us from being able to think certain thoughts. The general structure of his arguments was to claim that if a language has no word for a certain concept, then its speakers would not be able to understand this concept. If a language has no future tense, for instance, its speakers would simply not be able to grasp our notion of future time. 我们现在知道Whorf犯了许多错误。最严重的一个就是，他假定我们的母语会限制我们的思维，而且使我们无力思考某些概念。他论证的大体框架就是声称，如果一种语言没有某种概念对应的词汇，该语言的使用者就不能理解这种概念。例如，假设一种语言没有将来时态，它的使用者就无法理解未来时间的概念。 It seems barely comprehensible that this line of argument could ever have achieved such success, given that so much contrary evidence confronts you wherever you look. When you ask, in perfectly normal English, and in the present tense, “Are you coming tomorrow?” do you feel your grip on the notion of futurity slipping away? Do English speakers who have never heard the German word Schadenfreude find it difficult to understand the concept of relishing someone else’s misfortune? Or think about it this way: If the inventory of ready-made words in your language determined which concepts you were able to understand, how would you ever learn anything new? 我们很难理解为什么这一论点竟能获得如此巨大的成功，因为你随处可见大量相反的证据。当你用完全标准的英语以现在时态问出“Are you coming tomorrow?”这句话时，难道你就感觉到对未来这一概念的理解随之消逝了吗？难道从未听说过德语单词Schadenfreude的英语使用者就很难理解幸灾乐祸这一概念吗？或者这样思考一下：如果你的母语中现存的全部词汇决定了你可以理解哪些概念，那你又如何可能学到任何新东西呢？ SINCE THERE IS NO EVIDENCE that any language forbids its speakers to think anything, we must look in an entirely different direction to discover how our mother tongue really does shape our experience of the world. Some 50 years ago, the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out a crucial fact about differences between languages in a pithy maxim: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” This maxim offers us the key to unlocking the real force of the mother tongue: if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about. 既然并无证据表明任何一种语言会令其使用者无法思考某些事情，我们必须从反方向来探究我们的母语如何确实塑造了我们对世界的感受。大概五十年前，著名语言学家Roman Jakobson 用一句精辟箴言指出了关于不同语言之差异的一个关键事实：“语言实质上区别于它们所必须表达的内容，而不是它们可能表达的内容。”这句箴言给我们提供了解开母语真实威力的钥匙：如果不同的语言会以不同的方式影响我们的思维，这不会是由于语言允许我们思考什么内容，而会是由于语言内在地强制我们思考什么内容。 Consider this example. Suppose I say to you in English that “I spent yesterday evening with a neighbor.” You may well wonder whether my companion was male or female, but I have the right to tell you politely that it’s none of your business. But if we were speaking French or German, I wouldn’t have the privilege to equivocate in this way, because I would be obliged by the grammar of language to choose between voisin or voisine; Nachbar or Nachbarin. 考虑这样一个例子。假设我用英语对你说“我昨天晚上跟我的邻居一起”。你或许会想知道我的同伴是男还是女，但是我有权礼貌地告诉你这事与你无关。但是如果我们讲法语或者德语，我就没有这样含糊其辞的特权了，因为语法强制我必须从voisin与voisine或者Nachbar与Nachbarin中选择一个。 These languages compel me to inform you about the sex of my companion whether or not I feel it is remotely your concern. This does not mean, of course, that English speakers are unable to understand the differences between evenings spent with male or female neighbors, but it does mean that they do not have to consider the sexes of neighbors, friends, teachers and a host of other persons each time they come up in a conversation, whereas speakers of some languages are obliged to do so. 这些语言强迫我将同伴的性别告知你，不管我是否认为你与此事有什么干系。当然，这并不意味着英语使用者就无法理解与男邻居共度的夜晚和与女邻居共度的夜晚之间的区别，但这确实意味着他们并不需要思考在对话中出现的邻居、朋友、老师和其他许多人的性别，然而某些语言的使用者却必须这么做。 On the other hand, English does oblige you to specify certain types of information that can be left to the context in other languages. If I want to tell you in English about a dinner with my neighbor, I may not have to mention the neighbor’s sex, but I do have to tell you something about the timing of the event: I have to decide whether we dined, have been dining, are dining, will be dining and so on. 另一方面，英语也会强制你明确说明某些类型的信息，而这些信息在其他语言里可以留在语境里面。如果我想用英文给你讲我跟邻居的一顿晚餐，我可能不用必须提到我邻居的性别，但是我却必须告知你有关事件发生时间的一些东西：我必须选择我们是已经吃过晚饭了（we dined）、已经在吃着晚饭（have been dining）、正在吃着晚饭（are dining）还是将要吃晚饭（will be dining）等。 Chinese, on the other hand, does not oblige its speakers to specify the exact time of the action in this way, because the same verb form can be used for past, present or future actions. Again, this does not mean that the Chinese are unable to understand the concept of time. But it does mean they are not obliged to think about timing whenever they describe an action. 与此不同，汉语则并不强制其使用者这样详细说明动作的具体时间，因为汉语中同样的动词可以用于指称过去的、现在的和将来的动作。同样地，这并不意味这中国人就无法理解时间的概念。但是这确实意味着，无论何时描述一个动作，他们都不会被强制去考虑时间的问题。 When your language routinely obliges you to specify certain types of information, it forces you to be attentive to certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience that speakers of other languages may not be required to think about all the time. And since such habits of speech are cultivated from the earliest age, it is only natural that they can settle into habits of mind that go beyond language itself, affecting your experiences, perceptions, associations, feelings, memories and orientation in the world. 当你所用的语言经常强制你去说明特定种类的信息时，它会迫使你关注世界中的某些特定细节和经历中的某些特定方面，而这可能是其他语言的使用者不必一直思考的。因为这些说话的习惯从很小就开始养成，他们很自然就会变成超越语言本身的思维习惯，影响你在世上的体验、知觉、联想、感觉、记忆和倾向。 BUT IS THERE any evidence for this happening in practice? 但是有证据表明上述影响在现实中发生过吗？ Let’s take genders again. Languages like Spanish, French, German and Russian not only oblige you to think about the sex of friends and neighbors, but they also assign a male or female gender to a whole range of inanimate objects quite at whim. What, for instance, is particularly feminine about a Frenchman’s beard (la barbe)? Why is Russian water a she, and why does she become a he once you have dipped a tea bag into her? 我们再以性别为例。像西班牙语、法语、德语和俄语这样的语言不仅强制你思考朋友和邻居的性别，而且还心血来潮地赋予各种无生命的物体以性别。例如，法国人胡须怎么就成了阴性的？为何俄语中水是阴性的，但是把一个茶包放进她里面，她为何又会变成了他呢？ Mark Twain famously lamented such erratic genders as female turnips and neuter maidens in his rant “The Awful German Language.” But whereas he claimed that there was something particularly perverse about the German gender system, it is in fact English that is unusual, at least among European languages, in not treating turnips and tea cups as masculine or feminine. 众所周知，Mark Twain曾用“糟糕透顶的德语”一语来痛斥其稀奇古怪的词性，比如阴性的萝卜和中性的少女。尽管他声称德语的词性系统有些特别不合常理之处，但事实上，至少在欧洲各语言里，像英语这样不把萝卜和茶杯看作阴性或者阳性的，才真正是不同寻常。 Languages that treat an inanimate object as a he or a she force their speakers to talk about such an object as if it were a man or a woman. And as anyone whose mother tongue has a gender system will tell you, once the habit has taken hold, it is all but impossible to shake off. When I speak English, I may say about a bed that “it” is too soft, but as a native Hebrew speaker, I actually feel “she” is too soft. “She” stays feminine all the way from the lungs up to the glottis and is neutered only when she reaches the tip of the tongue. 那些把无生命物体当作他或她对待的语言，会迫使其使用者以它是一个男人或女人的方式来谈论该物体。而且，母语有性别系统的人会告诉你，一旦养成这种习惯，就不可能改掉了。当我说英语时，我可能会说一张床“它”太软了，但作为一个生来就讲希伯来语之人，我实际上是感觉到“她”太软了。从肺部上至声门，“她”一直都是阴性的，只有当她到达舌尖时才会变成中性。【编注：作者是犹太人，生于以色列特拉维夫市，在荷兰莱顿大学任教授】 In recent years, various experiments have shown that grammatical genders can shape the feelings and associations of speakers toward objects around them. In the 1990s, for example, psychologists compared associations between speakers of German and Spanish. There are many inanimate nouns whose genders in the two languages are reversed. A German bridge is feminine (die Brücke), for instance, but el puente is masculine in Spanish; and the same goes for clocks, apartments, forks, newspapers, pockets, shoulders, stamps, tickets, violins, the sun, the world and love. 近几年，不同实验均表明，语法上的性别可以塑造说话人对周围物体的感觉和联想。比如1990年代，心理学家比较了德语使用者和西班牙语使用者的联想。两种语言中有很多无生命名词的性别是相反的。比如德语中的桥是阴性的(die Brücke)，但是在西班牙语中桥(el puente)是阳性的。同样，时钟、公寓、叉子、报纸、口袋、肩膀、邮票、票、小提琴、太阳、世界和爱都是如此。 On the other hand, an apple is masculine for Germans but feminine in Spanish, and so are chairs, brooms, butterflies, keys, mountains, stars, tables, wars, rain and garbage. When speakers were asked to grade various objects on a range of characteristics, Spanish speakers deemed bridges, clocks and violins to have more “manly properties” like strength, but Germans tended to think of them as more slender or elegant. With objects like mountains or chairs, which are “he” in German but “she” in Spanish, the effect was reversed. 另一方面，对德国人来说，苹果是阳性的，但是在西班牙语中则是阴性的，椅子、扫帚、蝴蝶、钥匙、山岳、星星、桌子、战争、雨和垃圾也是如此。当说话者被要求对不同物体的一系列特征进行评分时，说西班牙语的人认为桥梁、时钟和小提琴拥有更多“男性特质”，比如力量；但是德国人则倾向于认为它们更加纤弱或雅致。对于像山岳或椅子这样德语中为阳性而在西班牙语为阴性的物品来说，效果正好相反。 In a different experiment, French and Spanish speakers were asked to assign human voices to various objects in a cartoon. When French speakers saw a picture of a fork (la fourchette), most of them wanted it to speak in a woman’s voice, but Spanish speakers, for whom el tenedor is masculine, preferred a gravelly male voice for it. More recently, psychologists have even shown that “gendered languages” imprint gender traits for objects so strongly in the mind that these associations obstruct speakers’ ability to commit information to memory. 在另一个实验中，说法语和西班牙语的人被要求为卡通中的不同物体配上人类发音。说法语的人看到一幅叉子(la fourchette)的图片时，大多数就想要为它配上女性声音，但在西班牙语中，叉子(el tenedor)是阳性的，其使用者就会更倾向于给它一个沙哑的男性声音。心理学家最近甚至揭示，“名词具有词性的语言”会将物体的性别特性在思维上留下极为深刻的印记，以致于这种联想甚至会阻碍语言使用者记忆信息的能力。 Of course, all this does not mean that speakers of Spanish or French or German fail to understand that inanimate objects do not really have biological sex — a German woman rarely mistakes her husband for a hat, and Spanish men are not known to confuse a bed with what might be lying in it. Nonetheless, once gender connotations have been imposed on impressionable young minds, they lead those with a gendered mother tongue to see the inanimate world through lenses tinted with associations and emotional responses that English speakers — stuck in their monochrome desert of “its” — are entirely oblivious to. 当然，所有这些并不意味着说西班牙语、法语或者德语的人不能理解无生命物体并没有真正的生物性别——一个德国女性很少会把她的丈夫错认为一顶帽子，西班牙男性也并不以混淆床和床上的东西而著称。然而，一旦性别涵义强加于易受影响的年轻头脑上，它们就会使得母语中名词具有词性的人通过联想和感性回应的滤镜来看待这无生命的世界，而这是困在单色的“its”沙漠中的英语使用者完全察觉不到的。 Did the opposite genders of “bridge” in German and Spanish, for example, have an effect on the design of bridges in Spain and Germany? Do the emotional maps imposed by a gender system have higher-level behavioral consequences for our everyday life? Do they shape tastes, fashions, habits and preferences in the societies concerned? At the current state of our knowledge about the brain, this is not something that can be easily measured in a psychology lab. But it would be surprising if they didn’t. 例如，“桥梁”在德语和西班牙语中相反的性别会对两国桥梁的设计有影响吗？词性系统所设置的情感地图对我们的日常生活会产生更高级别的行为后果吗？它们会影响相关社会的品味、时尚、习惯和倾向吗？在我们有关大脑的现有知识状态下，这并不是能在心理学实验室轻松测量出来的事情。但是如果它们没有影响，这会叫人意外。 The area where the most striking evidence for the influence of language on thought has come to light is the language of space — how we describe the orientation of the world around us. Suppose you want to give someone directions for getting to your house. You might say: “After the traffic lights, take the first left, then the second right, and then you’ll see a white house in front of you. Our door is on the right.” But in theory, you could also say: “After the traffic lights, drive north, and then on the second crossing drive east, and you’ll see a white house directly to the east. Ours is the southern door.” 我们在某个领域已经发现了有关语言影响思想的最引人注目的证据。这一领域就是有关空间的语言——我们如何描述我们周围世界的方向。假设你想给要去你家的某人指路。你可能会说：“过了红绿灯后，第一个路口左转，然后第二个路口右转，然后你会看到面前有一栋白房子。我家门在右边。”但是理论上，你也可以说：“过了红绿灯后，向北开，然后在第二个十字路口往东开，然后你会看到正东方向有栋白房子。我家门是南边那个。” These two sets of directions may describe the same route, but they rely on different systems of coordinates. The first uses egocentric coordinates, which depend on our own bodies: a left-right axis and a front-back axis orthogonal to it. The second system uses fixed geographic directions, which do not rotate with us wherever we turn. 这两组指令描述的是同一路线，但是它们依赖不同的坐标系统。第一种使用了依赖自己身体的自我中心坐标：左右坐标轴和与之垂直的前后坐标轴。第二种系统使用固定的地理方向，不论我们转向何处都不会随我们旋转。 We find it useful to use geographic directions when hiking in the open countryside, for example, but the egocentric coordinates completely dominate our speech when we describe small-scale spaces. We don’t say: “When you get out of the elevator, walk south, and then take the second door to the east.” The reason the egocentric system is so dominant in our language is that it feels so much easier and more natural. After all, we always know where “behind” or “in front of” us is. We don’t need a map or a compass to work it out, we just feel it, because the egocentric coordinates are based directly on our own bodies and our immediate visual fields. 我们发现有时使用地理方向很有用，比如当我们在开阔的野外徒步时。但是当我们描述小型空间时，自我中心坐标在我们的言谈中占绝大多数。我们并不会这么说：“出电梯后，往南走，然后在第二个门往东走。”自我中心坐标在我们的语言中如此重要，原因是我们觉得用起来更容易、更自然。毕竟，我们总是会知道我们的“后面”或者“前面”在哪。我们不需要地图或者指南针来辨别前后，我们只需靠感觉，因为自我中心坐标直接基于我们的身体和当下的视野。 But then a remote Australian aboriginal tongue, Guugu Yimithirr, from north Queensland, turned up, and with it came the astounding realization that not all languages conform to what we have always taken as simply “natural.” In fact, Guugu Yimithirr doesn’t make any use of egocentric coordinates at all. The anthropologist John Haviland and later the linguist Stephen Levinson have shown that Guugu Yimithirr does not use words like “left” or “right,” “in front of” or “behind,” to describe the position of objects. Whenever we would use the egocentric system, the Guugu Yimithirr rely on cardinal directions. 可是且慢，一种生僻的澳洲土著语言——北昆士兰的Guugu Yimithirr语——冒了出来，它让人们震惊地意识到，并不是所有语言都符合我们理所当然认定的“自然”。事实上，Guugu Yimithir语根本不使用自我中心坐标。先是人类学家John Haviland，后来又有语言学家Stephen Levinson，都表示Guugu Yimithirr语并不使用诸如“左”或“右”、“前”或“后”这些词来描述物体的方位。在任何我们使用自我中心坐标的场合，Guugu Yimithirr语都依赖于东西南北这种基本方向。 If they want you to move over on the car seat to make room, they’ll say “move a bit to the east.” To tell you where exactly they left something in your house, they’ll say, “I left it on the southern edge of the western table.” Or they would warn you to “look out for that big ant just north of your foot.” Even when shown a film on television, they gave descriptions of it based on the orientation of the screen. If the television was facing north, and a man on the screen was approaching, they said that he was “coming northward.” 如果他们想让你在车座上挪出点空位来，他们会说“往东移一点。”为了告诉你他们忘在你家的东西的具体位置，他们会说，“我把它落在西边桌子的南边了。”他们还会警告你，“小心你脚北边的大蚂蚁。”甚至当电视上播放电影时，他们也会基于屏幕的朝向来描述电影。如果电视机朝北，屏幕上的男人正在靠近，他们会说他“正在往北走”。 When these peculiarities of Guugu Yimithirr were uncovered, they inspired a large-scale research project into the language of space. And as it happens, Guugu Yimithirr is not a freak occurrence; languages that rely primarily on geographical coordinates are scattered around the world, from Polynesia to Mexico, from Namibia to Bali. Guugu Yimithirr语的这些怪异特性的发现，激发了对于空间语言的一项大规模研究项目。经过研究发现，Guugu Yimithirr语并不是不寻常的事情；主要依靠地理坐标的语言散落在世界各地，从波利尼西亚到墨西哥，从纳米比亚到巴厘岛。 For us, it might seem the height of absurdity for a dance teacher to say, “Now raise your north hand and move your south leg eastward.”But the joke would be lost on some: the Canadian-American musicologist Colin McPhee, who spent several years on Bali in the 1930s, recalls a young boy who showed great talent for dancing. As there was no instructor in the child’s village, McPhee arranged for him to stay with a teacher in a different village. 对于我们来说，如果一位舞蹈老师说“现在举起你北边的手，向东移动你的南腿”，可能听起来十分荒谬。但是某些情况下就不好笑了：曾于1930年代在巴厘岛生活过几年的美籍加拿大音乐学家Colin McPhee回忆说，他在那儿遇到过一个有着极佳舞蹈天赋的男孩。由于男孩的村子没有老师，McPhee就安排他跟着另一个村子的老师。 But when he came to check on the boy’s progress after a few days, he found the boy dejected and the teacher exasperated. It was impossible to teach the boy anything, because he simply did not understand any of the instructions. When told to take “three steps east” or “bend southwest,” he didn’t know what to do. The boy would not have had the least trouble with these directions in his own village, but because the landscape in the new village was entirely unfamiliar, he became disoriented and confused. Why didn’t the teacher use different instructions? He would probably have replied that saying “take three steps forward” or “bend backward” would be the height of absurdity. 但是几天后当他检查男孩的进展时，他发现男孩情绪低落而且老师充满怒气。因为男孩根本不能理解任何指令，所以没法教他任何事情。当被告知“向东三步”或者“往西南弯曲”时，他不知道该怎么做。男孩在他自己的村子就不会有这些方向上的麻烦，但是因为新村子的地貌完全不熟悉，他变得困惑，分不清方向。为什么老师不用不同的指令呢？他的回答大概是：说“往前三步”或者“向后弯曲”是极度荒谬的。 So different languages certainly make us speak about space in very different ways. But does this necessarily mean that we have to think about space differently? By now red lights should be flashing, because even if a language doesn’t have a word for “behind,” this doesn’t necessarily mean that its speakers wouldn’t be able to understand this concept. Instead, we should look for the possible consequences of what geographic languages oblige their speakers to convey. In particular, we should be on the lookout for what habits of mind might develop because of the necessity of specifying geographic directions all the time. 所以不同语言确实让我们对于空间的描述十分不同。但是这一定表明我们必须对空间有不同的思考吗？到此红灯应该闪起来了，因为即使一种语言没有“后面”这一个词，这不一定意味着说这种语言的人不能理解这个概念。相反，我们应该寻找地理语言强制它们的使用者传达某些内容所带来的后果。特别是我们应该留神观察，由于他们一直需要明确地理位置，他们的思维会形成什么样的习惯。 In order to speak a language like Guugu Yimithirr, you need to know where the cardinal directions are at each and every moment of your waking life. You need to have a compass in your mind that operates all the time, day and night, without lunch breaks or weekends off, since otherwise you would not be able to impart the most basic information or understand what people around you are saying. Indeed, speakers of geographic languages seem to have an almost-superhuman sense of orientation. Regardless of visibility conditions, regardless of whether they are in thick forest or on an open plain, whether outside or indoors or even in caves, whether stationary or moving, they have a spot-on sense of direction. 为了讲一种像Guugu Yimithirr这样的语言，你需要在你醒着的每一刻都知道基本方向在哪。你的脑中需要有一个一直运行的指南针，无论白天还是晚上，没有午休或者周末休息，否则你就无法表述最基本的信息，也无法理解周围人在说什么。确实，地理语言的使用者好像拥有近乎超人般的方向感。不管视线条件如何，不管他们在茂密的森林或是开阔的平原，不管在户外或是室内乃至洞穴中，不管静止还是移动，他们都有准确的方向感。 They don’t look at the sun and pause for a moment of calculation before they say, “There’s an ant just north of your foot.” They simply feel where north, south, west and east are, just as people with perfect pitch feel what each note is without having to calculate intervals. 他们不看太阳，也无需停下片刻计算一番，就能脱口而出“你脚的北边有一只蚂蚁。”他们凭感觉就能知道哪是北方、南方、西方和东方，就像有完美音调的人不用计算音程就能感觉出每个音调是什么。 There is a wealth of stories about what to us may seem like incredible feats of orientation but for speakers of geographic languages are just a matter of course. One report relates how a speaker of Tzeltal from southern Mexico was blindfolded and spun around more than 20 times in a darkened house. Still blindfolded and dizzy, he pointed without hesitation at the geographic directions. 在我们看来似乎不可思议的定位奇迹，对于使用地理语言的人来说是理所当然的事，关于此有太多故事可讲。一份报告描述了南墨西哥说Tzeltal语的人被蒙住眼睛在漆黑的屋子里转二十多圈的故事。转完后，虽然仍旧被蒙住双眼而且头昏，他还是毫不犹豫地指出了地理方向。 How does this work? The convention of communicating with geographic coordinates compels speakers from the youngest age to pay attention to the clues from the physical environment (the position of the sun, wind and so on) every second of their lives, and to develop an accurate memory of their own changing orientations at any given moment. So everyday communication in a geographic language provides the most intense imaginable drilling in geographic orientation (it has been estimated that as much as 1 word in 10 in a normal Guugu Yimithirr conversation is “north,” “south,” “west” or “east,” often accompanied by precise hand gestures). 这是怎么实现的呢？用地理坐标进行交流的习惯，使得说话者从很小开始就在生命中每一秒都去留意有关物理环境的线索（太阳的位置，风等等），培养出了在任何时刻都能记住自己方位变化的精确记忆力。所以在地理语言中，日常交流提供了对地理方位最大强度的想象训练（据估计，一次普通的Guugu Yimithirr语谈话中，每十个词就有一个是“北”“南”“西”或“东”，而且经常伴有准确的手部姿势）。 This habit of constant awareness to the geographic direction is inculcated almost from infancy: studies have shown that children in such societies start using geographic directions as early as age 2 and fully master the system by 7 or 8. With such an early and intense drilling, the habit soon becomes second nature, effortless and unconscious. When Guugu Yimithirr speakers were asked how they knew where north is, they couldn’t explain it any more than you can explain how you know where “behind” is. 这种恒常知晓地理方向的习惯从婴儿时期就开始得到灌输。研究表明，这种社会中的儿童最早在2岁就开始使用地理方向了，到了7、8岁就能完全掌握。有了这样早且高强度的训练，这种习惯很快就变成了毫不费力且不会察觉的第二本能。当Guugu Yimithirr语的使用者被问到他们如何知道哪是北方时，他们无法解释，就像你不能解释你怎么知道“后方”是哪一样。 But there is more to the effects of a geographic language, for the sense of orientation has to extend further in time than the immediate present. If you speak a Guugu Yimithirr-style language, your memories of anything that you might ever want to report will have to be stored with cardinal directions as part of the picture. One Guugu Yimithirr speaker was filmed telling his friends the story of how in his youth, he capsized in shark-infested waters. 但是地理语言的影响还不仅如此，因为方向感要求在当下时间的基础上有所延伸。如果你讲的是Guugu Yimithirr类型的语言，你对于自己想要说的任何东西的记忆都会将基本方向作为记忆画面的一部分来存储。一位讲Guugu Yimithirr的人曾被拍摄到向他的朋友讲述自己年轻时如何在遍布鲨鱼的水域里翻船的故事。 He and an older person were caught in a storm, and their boat tipped over. They both jumped into the water and managed to swim nearly three miles to the shore, only to discover that the missionary for whom they worked was far more concerned at the loss of the boat than relieved at their miraculous escape. Apart from the dramatic content, the remarkable thing about the story was that it was remembered throughout in cardinal directions: the speaker jumped into the water on the western side of the boat, his companion to the east of the boat, they saw a giant shark swimming north and so on. 他和一个年纪稍大的人被困在风暴中，他们的船翻了过来。他们都跳入水中，奋力游了3英里才到了海岸，却发现雇佣他们的传教士只关心船只损失，毫不庆幸他们奇迹般的死里逃生。除了这戏剧性的内容之外，值得注意的事情是整个故事都是通过基本方向来记忆的：说话者从船的西侧跳入水中，他的同伴在船的东侧跳下，他们看见了一条大鲨鱼从北面游来等等。 Perhaps the cardinal directions were just made up for the occasion? Well, quite by chance, the same person was filmed some years later telling the same story. The cardinal directions matched exactly in the two tellings. Even more remarkable were the spontaneous hand gestures that accompanied the story. For instance, the direction in which the boat rolled over was gestured in the correct geographic orientation, regardless of the direction the speaker was facing in the two films. 有没有可能，其中提到的基本方向只是临时想到的呢？很巧合的是，同一个人几年过后又被拍摄讲同样的故事。两次描述中的基本方向完全相符。更加引人注意的是伴随故事而出现的自发手势。例如，在讲述船往哪个方向摇晃时，他的手能够指向正确的地理方向，不管说话者在两段视频中面向哪个方向。 Psychological experiments have also shown that under certain circumstances, speakers of Guugu Yimithirr-style languages even remember “the same reality” differently from us. There has been heated debate about the interpretation of some of these experiments, but one conclusion that seems compelling is that while we are trained to ignore directional rotations when we commit information to memory, speakers of geographic languages are trained not to do so. 心理学实验也表明，在某些情况下，对于“同一个事实”，说Guugu Yimithirr型语言的人甚至会与我们有不同的记忆。关于如何解释部分此类实验，人们一直都有一些热烈的争议，但是有一个结论非常令人信服：尽管我们受到的思维训练是在记忆信息时忽略方向变化，但是说地理语言的人却被训练得不去这么做。 One way of understanding this is to imagine that you are traveling with a speaker of such a language and staying in a large chain-style hotel, with corridor upon corridor of identical-looking doors.Your friend is staying in the room opposite yours, and when you go into his room, you’ll see an exact replica of yours: the same bathroom door on the left, the same mirrored wardrobe on the right, the same main room with the same bed on the left, the same curtains drawn behind it, the same desk next to the wall on the right, the same television set on the left corner of the desk and the same telephone on the right. In short, you have seen the same room twice. 理解这种区别的一个方法是：想象你正与一个说这种语言的人一同旅行，住在一家各层走廊两边的门都一模一样的大型连锁酒店。你的朋友住在正对着你的房间，当你走进他的房间里时，你会看见跟你完全一样的房间：卫生间门一样在左侧，带镜衣柜一样在右侧，一样的主卧，床也一样在主卧的左边，后面一样是窗帘，靠右侧墙也一样摆着桌子，桌子的左边一样是电视，电话一样在右边。简言之，你两次看到的是相同的房间。 But when your friend comes into your room, he will see something quite different from this, because everything is reversed north-side-south. In his room the bed was in the north, while in yours it is in the south; the telephone that in his room was in the west is now in the east, and so on. So while you will see and remember the same room twice, a speaker of a geographic language will see and remember two different rooms. 但是当你的朋友进到你的房间时，他会看见相当不同的东西，因为所有事情都是南北颠倒的。在他的房间床是在北边，而在你的房间床是在南边；他房间里的电话是在西边，而你的在东边等等。所以尽管你两次看到并记住相同的房间，地理语言的使用者则看见和记住了两间不同的房间。 It is not easy for us to conceive how Guugu Yimithirr speakers experience the world, with a crisscrossing of cardinal directions imposed on any mental picture and any piece of graphic memory. Nor is it easy to speculate about how geographic languages affect areas of experience other than spatial orientation — whether they influence the speaker’s sense of identity, for instance, or bring about a less-egocentric outlook on life. 说Guugu Yimithirr的人把基本方向的十字瞄准器加诸于任何精神画面和图像记忆之上，我们很难想像他们是如何感受这个世界的。同时也很难猜测地理语言如何影响除了空间定向外的体验领域——比如它们是否会影响说话者对个体身份的理解或者是否会导致对于人生更少自我中心的看法。 But one piece of evidence is telling: if you saw a Guugu Yimithirr speaker pointing at himself, you would naturally assume he meant to draw attention to himself. In fact, he is pointing at a cardinal direction that happens to be behind his back. While we are always at the center of the world, and it would never occur to us that pointing in the direction of our chest could mean anything other than to draw attention to ourselves, a Guugu Yimithirr speaker points through himself, as if he were thin air and his own existence were irrelevant. 但是有个证据颇能说明问题：如果你看到一个说Guugu Yimithirr语的人指向他自己，你会自然地假设他有意引起对他自己的注意。事实上，他正在指向一个方向，刚好在他背后。尽管我们总是处于世界的中心，而且从来不会意识到，指向我们胸部方向的动作除了是想要引起对自己的注意之外，还能有什么别的意思，但是一个说Guugu Yimithirr语的人会指穿他自己，仿佛他是稀薄的空气，他自己的存在并不相关。 IN WHAT OTHER WAYS might the language we speak influence our experience of the world? Recently, it has been demonstrated in a series of ingenious experiments that we even perceive colors through the lens of our mother tongue. There are radical variations in the way languages carve up the spectrum of visible light; for example, green and blue are distinct colors in English but are considered shades of the same color in many languages. 我们所说的语言会在其他什么方面影响我们对世界的感受呢？最近，一系列别出心裁的实验表明，我们甚至是通过母语的滤镜来观察颜色的。在区分可见光光谱方面，各语言有很大的不同；例如，英语中绿色和蓝色是不同的颜色，但是在很多语言中它们却是同种颜色的不同色调。 And it turns out that the colors that our language routinely obliges us to treat as distinct can refine our purely visual sensitivity to certain color differences in reality, so that our brains are trained to exaggerate the distance between shades of color if these have different names in our language. As strange as it may sound, our experience of a Chagall painting actually depends to some extent on whether our language has a word for blue. 我们还发现，我们的语言所经常性地强制我们加以区分的颜色，会修正我们对于现实中特定颜色区别的视觉敏感性，所以如果这些颜色在我们的语言中有不同的名字，我们的大脑就会被训练得夸大不同色度颜色的差距。虽然这听起来很奇怪，但是我们对于Chagall画作的感受某种程度其实依赖于我们语言中是否有蓝色这一单词。 In coming years, researchers may also be able to shed light on the impact of language on more subtle areas of perception. For instance, some languages, like Matses in Peru, oblige their speakers, like the finickiest of lawyers, to specify exactly how they came to know about the facts they are reporting. You cannot simply say, as in English, “An animal passed here.” You have to specify, using a different verbal form, whether this was directly experienced (you saw the animal passing), inferred (you saw footprints), conjectured (animals generally pass there that time of day), hearsay or such. 在未来几年，研究人员或许能发现语言对更细微的感知领域的影响。例如，一些语言，像秘鲁的Matses，会像最挑剔的律师一样强制其使用者详细说明他们如何知晓正在讲述的事实。你不能像在英语中那样简单地说，“一动物经过了此处。”你必须用不同动词形式详细说明，这是直接经历的（你看到了一动物正在经过）、还是你推断的（你看到了脚印）、还是你猜测的（动物一般都会在一天中的那个时间经过那里），还是你听说的，诸如此类。 If a statement is reported with the incorrect “evidentiality,” it is considered a lie. So if, for instance, you ask a Matses man how many wives he has, unless he can actually see his wives at that very moment, he would have to answer in the past tense and would say something like “There were two last time I checked.” After all, given that the wives are not present, he cannot be absolutely certain that one of them hasn’t died or run off with another man since he last saw them, even if this was only five minutes ago. 如果提出一份陈述时的“证据性质”不正确，该陈述就会被认为是谎言。所以，举例来说，如果你问一个Matses男性他有多少老婆，除非他在那时能看到他妻子，否则他必须用过去时回答，会说一些“上次核实时，我有两个老婆”这样的话。毕竟，鉴于他的老婆并不在场，他不能绝对确定自从他上次看到她们后，他们中的一个有无死亡或者跟其他男人跑掉，即使“上次核实”也就在5分钟之前。 So he cannot report it as a certain fact in the present tense. Does the need to think constantly about epistemology in such a careful and sophisticated manner inform the speakers’ outlook on life or their sense of truth and causation? When our experimental tools are less blunt, such questions will be amenable to empirical study. 所以他不能用现在时把这作为一个确定事实来说。这种如此小心复杂地思考认识论的需要，会影响说话者对人生的看法或者他们对真相和起因的理解吗？只有在我们的实验工具足够锐利时，这些问题才能经受实证研究的检验。 For many years, our mother tongue was claimed to be a “prison house” that constrained our capacity to reason. Once it turned out that there was no evidence for such claims, this was taken as proof that people of all cultures think in fundamentally the same way. But surely it is a mistake to overestimate the importance of abstract reasoning in our lives. After all, how many daily decisions do we make on the basis of deductive logic compared with those guided by gut feeling, intuition, emotions, impulse or practical skills? 很多年来，我们的母语被称为限制我们理性能力的“牢笼”。一旦证明这样的说法没有证据，人们就以为这证明了所有文化的人根本上都以相同的方式进行思考。但是，过分高估抽象推理在我们生命中的重要性，这显然是个错误。毕竟，与那些在感觉、直觉、情感、冲动或实用技能指导下做出的日常决定相比，我们有多少决定是在演绎逻辑的基础上做出的呢？ The habits of mind that our culture has instilled in us from infancy shape our orientation to the world and our emotional responses to the objects we encounter, and their consequences probably go far beyond what has been experimentally demonstrated so far; they may also have a marked impact on our beliefs, values and ideologies. We may not know as yet how to measure these consequences directly or how to assess their contribution to cultural or political misunderstandings. But as a first step toward understanding one another, we can do better than pretending we all think the same. 我们的文化从婴儿时期就灌输进我们大脑的习惯，会影响我们在世界中的定向，和对我们所遇到的东西的情感回应，它们的影响可能比目前实验所揭示的要更深远；它们可能对我们的信仰、价值观和思想体系也有显著影响。我们可能还不知道如何直接测量这些影响，或者如何评估它们对于文化或政治误解的作用。但是作为迈向理解彼此的第一步，我们还可以做的更好，不能假装所有人都以相同方式思考。 Guy Deutscher is an honorary research fellow at the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures at the University of Manchester. His new book, from which this article is adapted, is “Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages,” to be published this month by Metropolitan Books. Guy Deutscher是曼彻斯特大学语言与文化学院的荣誉研究员。他的新书《透过语言之镜：为何其他语言中的世界看起来如此不同》这个月将由Metropolitan Books出版，本文即选摘自此书。 （编辑：辉格@whigzhou） *注：本译文未经原作者授权，本站对原文不持有也不主张任何权利，如果你恰好对原文拥有权益并希望我们移除相关内容，请私信联系，我们会立即作出响应。

——海德沙龙·翻译组，致力于将英文世界的好文章搬进中文世界——

【2016-04-25】 @whigzhou: 1）效仿成功者是人类行动的基本策略（之一），2）成功者探测器是一种心理功能，用来帮助实施这一策略，3）地位探测器是成功者探测器的一种近似替代品，4）地位装扮是效仿成功者策略的衍生策略，5）以上是声望品（prestige product）之市场价值的基础，6）以上是价值阶梯和文化优势起作用的基础， @whigzhou: 石油财富至少影响了数亿人的地位探测器的探测结果，西方知识界的反西方倾向至少影响了数千万人受教育人口的地位探测结果和对声望品的认定，他们继而又影响了所在社会数十亿人的价值取向，结果便是价值阶梯的断裂  

@海德沙龙：诺贝尔和平奖得主Eli Wiesel曾如此自问自答：“究竟是什么把一些年轻人推向恐怖主义？就是因为它简单粗暴。盲从狂热者没有问题，只有答案。而教育就是消除恐怖主义的方法”，但经验研究从未支持这一说法，本文作者对教育与恐怖主义的关系进行了更细致的考察。（教育会减少恐怖主义？  http://t.cn/RGDyD03） 我在想，人类对某些形式的内容（书面文本、巫师咒语、韵文、学术黑话、新闻联播……）似乎有着本能的迷信倾向，其心理基础究竟是什么呢？ 相对于其他来源的信息，以某些介质记录或以某些形式表现的信息，总是会被赋予额外的置信度（这是各种宣传术和骗术的基础），好像很奇怪。 我想到一种解释，不妨称为“可信度乐观主义”假说，假设初始状态下，所有个体对不同介质/形式的信息没有偏见，但他们对任何信息的可信度都采取乐观主义态度，即，当没有其他信息可帮助他判断某信息之可信度时，他便将置信度赋值为C，C>0.5，为了说起来方便，接下去就假设C=0.7吧。 好，现在引入第二个前提：某条信息被越多的别人相信，那么你像相信它那么行动，你的净收益就会越高，即：如果你信对了，得到的好处会比只有你一个人信更多，如果你信错了，蒙受的损失会比只有你一个人信更少。——这一前提，不妨称为“信念协同收益”，至少在许多事情上，貌似是成立的。 于是我们就有了一个解释：当你对你妈说“中医是垃圾”时，这条口语信息可能只有她一个人听到，因而不会产生信念协同收益，于是她对它的置信度C便是默认值0.7，相反，假如这句话来自新闻联播，那她便可以安全的预期，大批人会听到这条信息，其中大部分会以高于0.7的置信度相信它，于是，相信它就可获得信念协同收益，于是她便将置信度从0.7提高到0.9，于是你就输给了新闻联播。 总结：任何看上去可能会被很多其他人看到的信息，都会被赋予额外的置信度。 所以占领媒体的好处不仅是让信息得到更多受众，也包括提高受众对它的置信度。 实际上，当存在信念协同收益时，比“跟着大伙信”更好的策略是“保持怀疑同时像真信了那么行动”，许多人可能还真是这么做的，于是便有了深层信念和指导当前行动的“工作信念”之间的区别，Trivers所研究的自欺，大概就属此类。  

【2016-04-07】 @whigzhou: 延迟满足，延迟自我代入，延迟接入现实关切，之间或许有些相通之处。过于强烈的现实关切，可以将任何话题回路击穿，造成短路，结果任何话题在三句之内必定滑向少数几种定式之一。过于强烈的自我代入倾向效果类似。所以现实关怀或自我代入感过强的人，无法进行迂回程度较高的思考与讨论。  

Why Your Brain Actually Works Better in Winter 为什么你的大脑在冬天更好用？ 作者：Christian Jarrett @ 2016-2-14 译者：董慧颖 校对：斑马（@鹿兔马朦） 来源：science of us，http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/02/debunking-the-myth-of-the-winter-blues.html#. It was terrifyingly cold in New York this weekend, and this cold snap occurred right as we’re entering the postholiday doldrums. It’s around the time of the year when people start to talk about seasonal changes to their mood and energy level — most commonly, seasonal affective disorder, or SAD. While SAD is a relatively new condition — it stems from research in the ‘80s — it has become a huge part of how we in the colder climes discuss winter. 这个周末，纽约出奇的冷，寒流在我们假日后的沉闷期突然来袭。差不多就是这时候，人们开始谈论他们情绪和精力的季节性变化——季节性情感障碍（SAD）是最常见的话题之一。虽然SAD是一种历史较短的疾患（起源于1980年代的研究），但它已然成为身处更冷气候中的人们谈论严冬时津津乐道的话题。 Everyone knows how winter affects certain people: It lowers their mood, makes them more prone to depression, and, in some cases, slows their mind to a crawl. There’s a reason for the popular image of someone wanting to just curl up in bed to wait out the duration of a frigid February afternoon. 大家都知道冬季会对特定人群产生何种影响：寒冬会使他们的心情变差，让他们更容易患抑郁症，在某些情况下还会让他们的思维变迟钝。二月里一个严寒的下午，某人只想蜷缩在被窝中，静待时间流逝——这种大众印象自有缘由。 But scientists are coming to realize that this might not be quite right. A pair of new studies challenge many of the popular assumptions about the psychological effects of wintertime, suggesting that we should look at the season in a new, brighter light. The weather might be gray and chilly, but the latest science says we humans are better at dealing with this than we usually give ourselves credit for, both in terms of our mood and the basic functioning of our brains. 但科学家开始意识到这或许并不准确。两项最新研究挑战了许多有关冬季带来的心理影响的流行假设；这提示我们应该用一种新的、更加乐观的视角看待这个季节。冬日的天气或许是灰暗而寒冷的，但最新研究表明：人类应对寒冬的能力比我们自以为的更好——无论是情绪方面，还是大脑基本功能方面。 The first study is a massive investigation published recently in Clinical Psychological Science involving 34,294 U.S. adults. It casts doubt on the very notion that depression symptoms are worse in the winter months. 第一项研究是最近发表在《临床心理科学》上的大型调查，共计34294名美国成年人参与。这项研究质疑了“冬季会恶化抑郁症状”这种观念。 The researchers, led by Professor Steven LoBello at Auburn University at Montgomery, asked their participants to complete a questionnaire about their depression symptoms over the previous two weeks. Crucially, the participants all completed the survey at different times of the year, allowing the researchers to look for any seasonal patterns. 由奥本大学（位于蒙哥马利）的Steven LoBello教授带领的研究人员要求参与者填写一份关于他们近两周抑郁症状的调查问卷。至关重要的是，所有参与者都在当年不同时期完成调查，这让研究人员能够在其中寻找季节性规律。 Contrary to what you might think, the results provided no evidence whatsoever that people’s depression symptoms tended to be higher in winter — or at any other time of the year. This lack of a seasonal effect was true whether looking at the entire sample or only respondents with depressive symptoms. The respondents’ geographical latitude and sunlight exposure on the day of the survey were also unrelated to depression scores. 可能与你的预期不同，研究结果并没有为“人们的抑郁症状在冬季（或一年中任何其他时间）更明显”这种说法提供任何支持证据。无论是根据全部样本，还是仅考虑拥有抑郁症状的受访者，这种季节性影响的缺失都成立。调查当天受访者所处的地理纬度和接受的光照量同样与抑郁指数无关。 The researchers are clear about what this means for what they call the “well­-entrenched folk theory” that winter brings on or worsens depression. Their results, they write, “cast serious doubt on major depression with seasonal variation as a legitimate psychiatric disorder.” 研究者很清楚，这项结果对于他们所谓的“根深蒂固的民间理论”所认为的冬季能带来或加重抑郁症的说法意味着什么；他们认为这项研究成果“严重质疑了将‘与季节有关的重性抑郁’认定为一种精神疾病的合理性。” They think the early studies on the concept of SAD were flawed by virtue of the fact that they selectively recruited people who said they suffered from winter-related mood changes — an approach that was likely susceptible to confirmation bias, or selectively interpreting evidence to support a theory you already have. 他们认为，关于SAD概念的早期研究错在选择性地招募认为自己正在遭受冬季相关的情绪变化的人——这种方法很容易受确认偏误的影响，还容易使研究者通对证据的选择性解释去支持自己已有的理论。 This makes intuitive sense. Once the concept of SAD was introduced, after all, it captured the public imagination and went on to spawn a whole industry based around ways to treat the “condition,” including using artificial light. 这一质疑在直觉上说得过去。毕竟，一旦SAD概念被引入，它就抓住了公众的想象力，继而催生了基于治疗这种“病症”的方法（包括利用人工光照）的整个产业。 In spite of the sketchy evidence for SAD, once it was accepted that the dark months affect our mood, it was only a small step to assuming that they probably have an adverse effect on our cognition, too — hence the internet now being full of articles on how to beat that winter sluggishness. 尽管SAD的证据质量较差，人们一旦接受“灰暗的月份会影响我们心情”这种看法，离假设冬季对我们的认知也可能有不良影响也就不远了——因此，互联网上充斥着有关“如何打败冬日倦怠”的文章。 But this idea, too, is challenged by a new piece of research. That paper, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, looked at whether the time of year affects basic brain function. It’s one of the first studies to do so, and, like the depression-scores study, it seems to refute a common cultural understanding of the effects of cold, dark days. 但是一项新研究同样挑战了这个想法。这篇论文发表在《美国国家科学院院刊》，它就“年度时段是否会影响大脑功能”做了考察。这是最早涉猎该主题的研究之一，与前文中抑郁评分研究一样，这项研究成果似乎反驳了大众文化对于黑暗寒冷的日子所带来影响的理解。 The neuroscientists, led by Christelle Meyer at the University of Liège in Belgium, recruited 28 young men and women at different times of year to answer questions about their mood, emotions, and alertness; have their melatonin (a hormone that regulates the sleep cycle) levels measured; and complete two psychology tasks in a brain scanner. 由比利时Liège大学Christelle Meyer带领的神经科学家团队在一年中的不同时间招募了28名青年男女去回答关于自己心情、情绪和警觉性的问题；测试他们的褪黑激素（一种调节睡眠周期的激素）水平；并让他们在大脑扫描仪中完成两项心理任务。 One task was a test of vigilance and involved pressing a button as fast as possible whenever a stopwatch appeared at random intervals on-screen, and the other was a test of working memory, which involved listening to streams of letters and spotting when the current letter was the same as the one presented three items earlier. The basic idea was to see if the participants’ brain activity during these tasks was different depending on the season. 一项是警觉性测试，包括当屏幕上以随机时间间隔出现秒表时尽可能快地按按钮。另一项是工作记忆测试，包括听一连串字母，并认出和三个之前展示的字母一样的当前字母。该研究的基本宗旨是考察参与者在这些任务中的大脑活动是否会根据季节而不同。 The participants’ feelings of alertness, their emotional state, and melatonin levels mostly didn’t vary with the seasons, and they actually performed equally well on both tasks in the scanner regardless of the time of year, thus undermining the idea that the winter has an adverse effect on our mental abilities (more on this shortly). 参与者的警觉感、情绪状态、以及褪黑激素水平基本没有随季节而变化，而且实际上无论在一年中的什么时间，他们在两项于扫描仪中完成的任务里表现同样好，由此削弱了冬季会给我们的心理能力带来不利影响的想法。 One question on mood did show some seasonal variation, but participants’ moods were lowest in the fall, not winter. In terms of underlying brain function, participants’ neural activity was highest during the memory task for those participants tested in spring and lowest for those tested in the fall, so, far from being a special case, winter brain activity sat in the middle. 在关于情绪的其中一个问题上，数据确实表现出一定的季节性变化，但是参与者的情绪最低点在秋季，而不是冬季。在相应的大脑功能方面，记忆测试中，春季接受测试的参与者的神经活动最高，秋季接受测试者的神经活动最低。因此，冬天的大脑活动处于中间水平，并不特别。 Meanwhile, during the vigilance task, brain activity was lowest in the winter and highest in the summer. Some media outlets have interpreted this as evidence for winter sluggishness, but as the participants’ performance and alertness was as good in winter as at other times of year, their reduced winter brain activity can actually be seen as a sign of improved efficiency. For comparison, consider research showing how the more expert people become at a task, the less brain activity is seen while they perform that task, as the brain becomes more efficient. 同时，在警觉性测试中，大脑活动水平在冬季最低，夏季最高。一些媒体把这解释为冬季倦怠的证据，但是参与者在冬季的表现与警觉性和一年中其他时间一样好，他们减弱的冬季大脑活动可以看成是效率提高的一个标志。为了进行比较，请考虑另一些研究，它们揭示了，随着人们在任务中变得更专业，大脑执行该任务的效率提高，执行任务时的大脑活动会变得更低。 You could even think of this reduced winter neural activity as your brain entering a kind of “eco mode,” allowing it to perform as well as it does in summer but while consuming fewer resources. This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective: When resources are scarce and the weather is harsh, it’s obviously advantageous that the brain should be capable of performing basic tasks, especially those involving vigilance, in an economic fashion. (I should note that this is my interpretation — the researchers remain relatively neutral about the meaning of the seasonal effects they observed, and didn’t return an email I sent them inquiring about what those effects might mean.) 你甚至可以把这种冬季减弱的神经活动看成是大脑进入了一种“经济模式”，允许其和在夏天表现得一样好但同时消耗更少的资源。这从进化的角度来看说得通：当资源稀缺，天气恶劣时，如果大脑能以一种经济节能的方式执行基本任务，特别是涉及警觉性的任务，显然是有利生存的。（我有必要指出，这是我自己的解释——研究者对他们观察到的季节性影响的含义保持相对中立，并且没有回复我发给他们的质询这些影响背后意义的邮件。） This suggestion that our mental function might actually be enhanced in winter is actually backed up by a (frequently ignored) study published in the late 1990s in Applied Cognitive Psychology. Researchers at the University of Tromsø in Norway tested 62 participants on a range of mental tasks in winter and again in summer (some completed them in winter first, the others in summer, thus balancing out any practice effects). 我们的心理功能实际上有可能会在冬季增强这一看法，事实上还被1990年代末发表在《应用认知心理学》的一项（经常被忽视的）研究支持。挪威特罗姆斯大学的研究者测试了62名参与者在冬季和夏季的一系列心理测试（一部分参与者先在冬天完成，其余参与者在夏季完成，因此排除任何练习效应）。 This was just about the perfect setting for such a study, since the contrasts were so extreme: Tromsø is located more than 180 miles north of the Arctic Circle, meaning there is virtually no sunlight in Tromsø during the winter and no darkness in the summer. 对于此种研究这是一个完美的设定，因为对比是如此极端：特罗姆斯位于北极圈以北180多公里，这意味着实际上特罗姆斯的冬季几乎没有阳光，夏季几乎没有黑暗。 Across the battery of tests, the researchers found little evidence of seasonal effects, but those they did find were largely in favor of a winter advantage. In winter, participants performed better on two different tests of reaction time, and they showed evidence of enhanced mental control on the well-established Stroop test that involves naming color words while ignoring the ink color they are written in. Only one test showed a slight summer advantage, and that was for verbal fluency. 在一系列测试中，研究者只发现了很少有关季节性影响的证据，但是只要是他们是他们找到了的，大部分有利于冬季优势。在冬季，参与者在两项不同的反应时间测试中表现更好，并且在著名的斯特鲁测试中，涉及到报出颜色词汇而忽略写下它们所用的墨水颜色，他们表现出精神控制增强的证据。只有一个测试显示了轻微的夏季优势，那是涉及语言流利性的。 Summing up their findings, Dr. Tim Brennan and his colleagues wrote that “despite the subjective feeling one may have that one is mentally sluggish in winter, our data do not lend empirical support to the intuitive claim.” 总结他们的发现时，提姆布伦南博士和他的同事们写道：“尽管主观感觉一个人或许在冬季精神上会倦怠，我们的数据却并没有为这种直觉断言提供经验支持。” Many people dislike winter for obvious reasons, and the idea that these darker months make many of us profoundly miserable and cognitively impaired fits a narrative about this being a difficult time of year (as Adam Gopnik wrote, “one of the most natural metaphors we make is of winter as a time of abandonment and retreat. The oldest metaphors for winter are all metaphors of loss”). 很多人出于显而易见的理由不喜欢冬季，人们认为这些阴暗的月份让许多人极度痛苦、认知受损，这种想法迎合了关于这一年度艰难时期的一段描述——亚当·戈普尼克写道，“我们最自然的隐喻之一是将冬季比作放弃和退缩的时期。而且关于冬季最古老的隐喻全都关乎失去。” But we should be cognizant of how our expectations shape the way we experience the world — it may be the case that, after hearing over and over and over that winter slows us down, making us more sluggish and sad, we interpret days when we’re feeling down for other reasons as proof that it’s winter’s fault. 但我们应该认识到，我们的期望会塑造我们体验世界的方式——以下状况是可能的：当一遍又一遍听到冬季会使人迟钝，让我们变得倦怠和悲伤时，我们会把自己因其他原因感到沮丧的事例归罪于冬季。 Sure, the winter presents us with many practical challenges, like coping with colds and flu and getting to work through the snow, but what these new studies suggest is that the season doesn’t have some mystical, malevolent effect on our brains. If anything, the data suggest that our minds are more sprightly at this time of year than in the summer. Now there’s some news to brighten your day — even if it’s an abysmally cold, short one. 当然，冬季会给我们带来很多实际的挑战，比如应对感冒和流感、穿过雪地去上班，但是这些最新研究显示，冬季并不会对我们的大脑有神秘的、恶毒的影响。如果说有影响，这些数据显示我们的思维在每年这个时候比起夏季更加活跃。现在总算有了些好消息来照亮你的日子——即使是一个极冷极短的冬日。 （编辑：辉格@whigzhou） *注：本译文未经原作者授权，本站对原文不持有也不主张任何权利，如果你恰好对原文拥有权益并希望我们移除相关内容，请私信联系，我们会立即作出响应。

——海德沙龙·翻译组，致力于将英文世界的好文章搬进中文世界——

Republicans prefer politicians with deep voices 共和党选民更青睐声音低沉的政治家 作者：Aarhus University @ 2015-11-24 译者：Luis Rightcon(@Rightcon) 校对：沈沉（@你在何地-sxy） 来源：EurekAlert，http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-11/au-rpp112415.php A deep voice and a square jaw are important assets for conservative politicians. For politicians on the liberal side, it's more important to have gentle features. That's the conclusion of two recent scientific articles from Aarhus University. The implication is not only that physical features have a larger impact on voter preferences than previously thought but also that different physical features appeal to different voter segments. 拥有低沉嗓音和方形下巴对于保守派政客而言是非常重要的资产。而对于自由派政客，拥有相对柔和的特性则更为重要。这是最近两篇出自奥尔胡斯大学的科学论文所得出的结论，这两篇文章不仅表明身体特征对选民倾向的影响比以前所认为的要更大，而且指出不同的身体特征会吸引不同的选民群体。 The results run counter to the ideal that voters in democratic societies make their decisions after carefully weighing the pros and cons of the political programs put forward by the various parties, according to Lasse Laustsen and Michael Bang Petersen from the university's Department of Political Science, who carried out the research. 这项研究是由奥尔胡斯大学政治科学系的Lasse Laustsen和Michael Bang Petersen做的，研究所得出的结果与那种认为民主社会选民会在仔细权衡各政党所推行的政治纲领的利弊之后再做出选择的设想恰好背道而驰。 "A deep tone of voice appeals to conservative voters. More generally, conservative voters seem to have a preference for politicians who look physically strong and masculine, while liberal voters prefer those who have less dominant features and seem more accommodating, perhaps even slightly feminine," said Laustsen. Laustsen指出：“低沉的嗓音会吸引保守派选民。更一般的来说，保守派选民似乎倾向于外表看上去更强壮，更阳刚的政客，而自由派选民则更喜欢不那么强势而且更随和，甚至可能有点轻微女性化的政客。” The new studies form an example of how political scientists can achieve a deeper understanding of political behavior by using a broader variety of research tools. The approach is increasingly adopted by political scientists all over the world, including John Hibbing, a professor of political science at University of Nebraska-Lincoln. 这一使用多种研究工具的新研究为政治学家树立了深入理解政治行为的典范。全世界的政治学家正在逐步采用这种研究方式，内布拉斯加－林肯大学政治学教授John Hibbing就是其中之一。 "It's a fairly limited niche, but it's growing. What Laustsen and Petersen do is both exciting and important. Some people may be uncomfortable knowing that our preferences are determined by forces that we don't entirely understand. But of course, as scientists we still have to deal with it," said Hibbing, who didn't take part in the Laustsen and Petersen's research. “这是个相当有限的细分领域，但是在不断发展壮大。Laustsen和Petersen的工作既令人兴奋又非常重要。我们的（政治）倾向被我们没有完全理解的力量所决定，这一点会令许多人感到不舒服。但是我们作为科学家当然还是要应对它。”Hibbing说。Hibbing本人没有参与Laustsen和Petersen的研究。 One of the articles is based on data from US politics and demonstrates that Republican voters are more likely than voters from the Democratic camp to vote for politicians with deep voices. To understand why this is, you have to dig a little deeper, according to Laustsen. Republican voters prefer strong politicians - or politicians whose deep voices make them sound like they are strong - because they believe the world is a more dangerous and menacing place than Democratic voters, he said. 其中一篇论文基于美国政治的数据，证明了共和党选民较之民主党阵营选民更倾向于选择嗓音低沉的政客。在Laustsen看来，要理解其中原因，需要进一步挖掘这项事实。他认为共和党选民倾向于身体强壮的政客，或者嗓音低沉的政客——嗓音低沉使得他们听起来比较强壮——是因为共和党选民相信真实世界要比民主党选民所认为的更加险恶。 "If you hold up images of objects that people consider dangerous or unpleasant, for example of large spiders, and then measure the production of sweat from people's fingertips (skin conductance response), you get an indication of spontaneous physical reaction. In these cases, conservative voters react more strongly than liberal ones. This could indicate a large visceral difference in the way these voter groups perceive the world," Laustsen said. Laustsen说：“如果你举起人们觉得危险或者令人不适的物体图片，比如说巨型蜘蛛，然后测试观察者指尖的出汗量（皮电反应），你会看到身体自发的应激反应。在这类试验中，保守派选民比自由派选民的反应更为激烈。这可能表明这些选民群体在认知世界的层面上有着很大的本能上的差别。” Laustsen and Petersen's research proceeds from the observations that in order to understand the behavior of modern humans, you need to look into the evolutionary history that has shaped the psychology producing this behavior. 为了理解现代人类的行为，必须从产生行为的心理着手，而人类的进化史塑造了自身的心理。基于这样的看法，Laustsen和Petersen的研究就由此入手。 In prehistoric times when the ancestors of modern humans were roaming the East-African savannah in small groups, it made sense to support the strongest members of the tribe when confronted with danger. Psychological mechanisms which 30,000 years ago saved our ancestors from being devoured by saber-toothed tigers and other fierce animals continue to be at work today, explaining, among other things, why people vote as they do along the left-right continuum. 史前时代，现代人类的祖先组成许多小群体漫游在东非稀树大草原上。这样，在遇上危险时支持群体里的最强壮者就显得尤为重要。三万年前的心理机制保护了我们的祖先不被剑齿虎和许多其他猛兽吞噬殆尽，而同样的心理机制至今仍在发挥作用。这就能解释许多事情，包括为什么人类在投票时（所表现出的政治倾向）会沿从左到右的光谱排列。 "There are evolutionarily important reasons for the structure of our psychology. Our ancestors had to make a decision about which leader to follow, and it was crucial for their survival and reproduction that they picked the right one. As a species we are pre-programmed to think in a certain way about who we would like to be in charge. This affects choices that we make even today," said Petersen. “我们的心理结构是具有进化意义上的重大缘由的。我们祖先必须就领袖人选作出抉择，选择正确的人选对于他们的生存和繁衍极其重要。作为一个物种，我们被预先设定好以某种特定方式来考虑谁才是我们中意的领导者。这甚至一直在影响今天我们所作出的决定。”Petersen说。 Is this knowledge useful for the politicians? For example, would it be helpful for conservative politicians to tone down their dominant, masculine personality traits in hopes of snatching voters further to the left who tend to find less dominant features more attractive? 这项知识对政客有用吗？举例来说，保守派政客是否可以通过软化他们的强势个性特征来吸引更加左翼、更加青睐没有太多强势特征的人选的选民？ "Democrats are often seen as empathic, compassionate types. Republicans, by contrast, are often considered as strong leaders with a moral compass. This kind of subjective views may have real importance in cases where a Republican candidate is seen as more empathic than his Democratic opponent and trespasses into his territory. Perhaps he can gain some votes there," he said. Petersen指出：“民主党人往往被视为富于同情怜悯的类型。与之相对，共和党人往往被认为是具有道德模范特性的强大领袖。这样的主观印象也许会在某些场合发挥重大作用，比如在一个共和党候选人比他的民主党对手显得更具有同情心，侵入了后者的基本盘的情况下，这位共和党候选人将会挣来一些（偏左翼的）选票。” Can the voters use these new insights for anything? It's always better to be aware of what causes you to have the preferences you have. But the roots of our likes and dislikes are buried so deep in the subconscious that the two authors doubt there is very much to do about them. 选民们能通过这些新洞见干些什么呢？了解到你的倾向由何而来当然是很不错的。但是我们喜恶的根源是如此深埋在潜意识中，以至于两位作者不觉得我们能在此有什么作为。 "We can't necessarily do very much to control this. Some American research indicates that participants in lab tests are able to determine which of two unknown candidates they like more after having been exposed to images of them for less than 0.1 second. This suggests that these processes are really fast and subconscious. So I think it's hard to rein in," Laustsen said. Laustsen说“我们不一定能够控制这个。一些来自美国的研究指出，实验室测试的参与者们会在看到两位陌生候选人图片的0.1秒之内决定出他们的偏好。这显示了做出选择的过程非常快速，且深深扎根于潜意识中。所以我认为很难去驾驭这一过程。” （编辑：辉格@whigzhou） *注：本译文未经原作者授权，本站对原文不持有也不主张任何权利，如果你恰好对原文拥有权益并希望我们移除相关内容，请私信联系，我们会立即作出响应。

——海德沙龙·翻译组，致力于将英文世界的好文章搬进中文世界——