经济学人下载:心理 太不公平啦!

Science and technology
科学技术

Psychology
心理

Snot fair!
太不公平啦！

Exactly when is something perceived as not fair?
究竟在什么情况下人们会觉得不公平？

AS THE bankster phenomenon has so eloquently illustrated, Homo sapiens is exquisitely sensitive to injustice.
强盗银行家的现象已经有力地证明，人类对于不公平是敏感至极的。

Many people grudgingly tolerated the astronomical incomes of financial traders, and even the cosmological ones of banks' chief executives, when they thought those salaries were earned by honest labour.
过去，许多人对于操盘手高到天上去的收入，甚至是银行高管天文数字一般的薪酬，虽愠愠不平，但尚能忍耐，他们曾以为这些收入是靠诚实劳动赚来的。

Now, so many examples to the contrary have emerged that toleration has vanished.
但如今，随着大量反例的出现，公众的忍耐已经不复存在。

Surprisingly, however, the psychological underpinnings of a sense of injustice—in particular, what triggers willingness to punish an offender, even at a cost to the punisher—have not been well established.
然而让人惊讶的是，心理学上对于不公平感的成因尚未能做出很好的解释，尤其是为何人们不惜付出代价也要惩罚侵犯者。

But a recent experiment by Nichola Raihani of University College, London, and Katherine McAuliffe of Harvard, just published in Biology Letters, attempts to disentangle the matter.
但是，英国伦敦大学学院的尼古拉·雷汉尼和哈佛大学的凯瑟琳·麦考利夫最近进行的一项实验尝试对这个问题抽丝剥缕，这一实验的结果发表在了最近的《生物学快报》上。

Dr Raihani and Ms McAuliffe tested two competing hypotheses.
雷汉尼博士和麦考利夫女士对两种对立的猜想进行了验证。

One is that the desire to punish is simple revenge for an offence.
第一种猜想认为，惩罚侵犯者的欲望只是一种报复心理。

The other is that it is related to the offence's consequences—specifically, whether or not the offender is left better off than the victim.
另一种猜想则认为这与侵犯的结果有关—具体来说，即侵犯者的境况是否比受害者更好。

Until recently, the temptation would have been to advertise for undergraduate volunteers for such a project.
一直到最近，像这样的项目往往会通过广告吸引大学生志愿者。

Instead, Dr Raihani and Ms McAuliffe decided to follow a new fashion in psychology and recruit their human guinea pigs through a system called Mechanical Turk.
但是雷汉尼博士和麦考利夫女士决定采取心理学界新近流行的一种方法，借由一个叫做机械土耳其的系统招收他们实验的小白鼠。

This arrangement, run by Amazon, a large internet firm, pays people registered with it small sums of money to do jobs for others.
这一系统由网络巨头亚马逊公司组织，注册用户为别人工作后可以领到小额的酬劳。

That allowed the two researchers not only to gather many more volunteers than would have been possible from the average student body, but also to spread the profile of those volunteers beyond the halls of academe and beyond the age of 21.
通过这个系统，两位研究者不仅找到了比普通学生群体更多的志愿者，还得以将志愿者的范围扩大到了学术界以外和21岁以上的人群。

Dr Raihani and Ms McAuliffe asked their Turkers to play a game.
雷汉尼博士和麦考利夫女士请参与实验的特客玩了一个游戏。

In it, the volunteers were paired and given small sums of money.
在游戏中，志愿者以两人一组一一配对，并各自获得一小笔钱。

One member of a pair could then take a predefined sum from the other, or not, as he chose.
组里的一名志愿者可以选择是否从另一名组员那里拿走预定数量的钱。

After that the other could, at a certain cost to himself, impoverish his opponent to a greater degree.
之后，另一位组员在自己付出一定代价的前提下，可以大量减少对方的财产。

The first player might receive ten cents, 30 cents or 70 cents.
每一组的游戏者甲最开始可能会收到10美分、30美分或是70美分作为起始财产。

The second player always received 70 cents.
而游戏者乙则总会收到70美分。

The first player was then allowed to take 20 cents of the second player's money.
然后甲被允许先从乙处取走20美分。

Finally, the second player could reduce the first player's total sum by 30 cents, but at a cost of ten cents to himself—in other words, he lost money too by doing so.
最后乙可以选择使甲的财产减少30美分，但是作为代价他自己也必须拿出10美分—换句话说，这么做乙自己蒙受了损失。

The crucial point of the game is that in all three cases the second player suffers the same absolute loss if the first chooses to take money from him.
这个游戏最关键的一点在于，无论甲的起始财产是多少，只要甲选择拿走乙的钱，乙都要蒙受完完全全的损失。

The offence, in other words, is identical.
也就是说，不论哪种情况，乙所受到的侵犯总是一样的。

But in the first version of the game he remains ahead if he does not retaliate, in the second he comes out equal, and in the third he ends up behind.
但在第一种情况中，如果乙不采取反击，他还能保持领先，第二种情况下甲乙平局，而第三种情况中，乙则会以落后告败。

The upshot was that in the first two cases about 15% of second players chose to retaliate if they had money taken.
游戏的结果显示，在前两种情况中，只要钱被拿走，15%扮演乙的志愿者会选择反击。

This was more or less the same as the number in all three versions of the game who retaliated even though they did not have money taken.
而综合三种情况来看，乙在钱没有被拿走的前提下依然选择向对方进行反击的现象也大概占15%。

In the third version, though, more than 40% of second players retaliated when money was taken from them—even though the outcome was still that the first player ended up ahead, with 60 cents to the second player's 40 cents.
但在第三种情况中，一旦钱被拿走，超过40%扮演乙的志愿者会采取反击—即便甲仍然会以60美分比40美分的优势取得游戏的胜利。

On the face of things, this result suggests that what really gets people's goat is not so much having money taken, but having it taken in a way that makes the taker better off than the victim.
乍一看，这样的结果意味着真正让人感到愤恨的不是自己的钱被拿走，而是拿走钱的人在拿走钱后财产比受害者多。

That will clearly bear further investigation, for example by looking at the case where the first player begins the game better off than the second.
显然这个结论需要更多的调查加以证明，比如假如从一开始甲的钱就比乙多，结果会如何。

It is intriguing, though, that even such trivial sums of money can provoke thoughts of revenge.
有意思的是，就是这么不起眼的几十美分也能激发人的报复心理。

In light of this, the fate awaiting those astronomically paid bankers could be a particularly nasty one.
从这一点看来，等待着那些拿着超高薪待遇的银行家们的命运颇为险恶。