十个惊人的科学事实:我们为何热爱清单

Lists are very popular, so logically lists about popular things would be more popular again. Bacon, sexy ladies, funny cats and tweets, all of these regularly end up on lists. You may say this point isn't scientific in any way, but I include it as evidence for the above point. Which means it is scientific in a very tenuous way.
清单非常流行，所以从逻辑上讲，关于流行事物的清单会更加流行。火腿、性感女郎、有趣喵星人以及推特。通常情况下，所有这些东西最后都会排上清单。你可能会觉得这一论点根本不科学，但我把它作为上一个论点的证据。这意味着，它是科学的，以一种相当微妙的方式。

7. Lists fit the way humans tend to read
七、清单适合人类倾向于进行阅读的方式

It has been demonstrated many times, in scientific studies and Martin Robbins' blog, that the way people read things on the internet follows anF-shaped pattern. While this is detrimental to blogs and articles with continuous prose, this is obviously beneficial for lists of things, as the reader is reading in a pattern that largely follows a list structure.
通过科学研究和马丁?罗宾的博客已经论证多次的是，人们在网上看东西的方式遵循着一种F型模式。这一模式不利于登载系列散文的博客和文章，却显然有利于清单，因为读者阅读的模式很大程度上遵循了清单的结构。

8. There are many popular types of list, not just on the internet
八、有许多受欢迎的清单类型，并不只是在网上

Lists predate the internet by some considerable margin, and aren't necessarily constrained or dependent on it. Examples include shopping lists, bucket lists, guest lists and hit lists. These lists are invariably detached from the subject matter in some way; nobody ever buys a shopping list, bucket lists rarely feature buckets, a guest list is rarely seen inside a party/club, and there are no records of someone being killed with an actual hit list. Contrastingly, Craigslist was created by someone called Craig. To date, there is no evidence of a popular list of all the angles at which a ship may list, suggesting that list formats are incompatible.
清单在很大程度上先于互联网，并且不受制于或依赖于它。例子包括购物单、愿望单（bucket lists）、宾客单和暗杀名单（hit lists）。这些清单总是以某种方式脱离主题；从未有人买过购物单，愿望单和“桶（bucket）”没有关系，宾客单在聚会或俱乐部里基本见不到，也没有关于暗杀名单上的某人被害的记录。相反，一个名叫克雷格（Craig）的人创办了克雷格清单网站（Craigslist，美国免费分类广告网站——译注）。迄今为止，尚无证据表明存在一个可以包罗万象的流行清单，这说明清单样式是不兼容的。

9. Some entries on a list are likely to be just padding
九、清单上的某些条目似乎只是打酱油的

As mentioned, a list of 10 things, or a multiple thereof. This will inevitably lead to someone preparing a list and including things that shouldn't really be in it in order to make it 10 items in length. This makes it look "proper". See the point before this one for a demonstration of this happening.
如上文所述，大部分人使用十进制。绝大多数清单除了在标题里使用“惊人的”、“令人震惊的”或“ 不可思议”等等词汇（听上去让人印象深刻，但在技术上无法反驳）之外，还会列出十项或者是十的倍数项的事物。这就不可避免的使得某些人在制作清单时，为了凑出十个条目而列出一些并不该出现的事物。这让清单看上去是“合适的”。本文第八条就可以证明这一点。

10. People will tend to remember the last thing on a list
十、人们倾向于记住清单上的最后一件事

Lists are commonly used as tools for assessing people's memory. Word lists are a typical tool for testing someone's ability to remember and recall items, and can be designed and adapted to analyse a wide variety of human memory abilities. One of the things uncovered by this sort of research is the recency effect, meaning people are more likely to remember the last thing they are presented with, due to the way attention works and the demands of memory formation. So when you try to tell someone about this list, you may end up saying "The last thing on the list was that you're more likely to remember the last thing on the list".
清单通常是被用来评估人们记忆的工具。单词表就是用以测试记忆和回想条目能力的典型工具，它可以被设计并适合于分析人类记忆能力的多样性。这类研究所发现的事实之一就是“近因效应”，也就是说，由于注意力的工作方式以及记忆形成的需要，人们更容易记住摆在他们面前的最后一样事物。所以，当你试图告诉别人本文中的清单时，你最后可以说，“清单上的最后一件事是，你更容易记住清单上的最后一件事。”