经济学人下载:性感吸引:我的化学浪漫(2)

Dr Hare and his colleagues took 43 men and 51 women, all of them straight, and gave them two tasks.
Hare博士和他的同事们找了43名男性和51名女性，他们都是异性恋，给了他们两个任务。

One was to decide whether an androgynous computer-generated face was, on balance, more likely to be female or male.
一个是决定计算机生成的雌雄同体的脸，全面考虑来看，更可能是女性还是男性。

The other was to rate members of the opposite sex shown in photographs for both their sexual attractiveness and their likelihood of being unfaithful.
另一个是评估照片中显示的异性成员的性吸引力和他们不忠的可能性。

The participants completed both tasks twice, on consecutive days.
参与者在连续几天两次完成了两项任务。

On one day they were exposed to the appropriate molecule (AND for the women; EST for the men) and on the other to a placebo that ought to have had no effect.
一天，让他们处于适当的分子中（对于女性为AND；对于男性为EST），另一天则暴露于应该没有作用的安慰剂中。

Crucially, the study was double-blinded, which meant that neither the researchers nor the participants knew which day was which.
至关重要的是，研究是双盲的，这意味着研究人员和参与者都不知道哪一天是哪一天。

This should have made it impossible for unconscious biases on the part of the experimenters or the subjects to have had any effect on the result.
这应该会使实验者或受试者的无意识偏差不可能对结果有任何影响。

If AND and EST really are aphrodisiac pheromones, the researchers reasoned, then they ought to make participants more likely to assume that androgynous faces belonged to the opposite sex.
研究人员推论说，如果AND和EST真的是催情信息素，那么它们应该让参与者更容易认为雌雄同体的面孔属于异性。

They should also boost the sex appeal of the people in the photographs—and, because of that boost, increase the perception that those people might be unfaithful,
它们还应该提高人们在照片中的性吸引力，并且，由于这种促进，加强了这些人可能不忠的看法，

since the attractive have more opportunities for infidelity than the plain.
因为有吸引力的人比长相普通的人有更多不忠的机会。

In fact, they did none of these things. The study thus found no evidence that either AND or EST is a pheromone.
事实上，他们并没有像推论假设的那样表现。因此，研究没有发现任何证据表明AND和EST都是信息素。

Those who buy pheromone perfumes based on them would therefore appear to be wasting their money.
那些基于它们而购买信息素香水的人似乎是在浪费钱。

Whether the triumph of hope over experience will cause them to carry on doing so anyway is a different question altogether.
是否是希望战胜经验的满足感会使他们继续这样做就完全是一个不同的问题了。