科学美国人60秒:Candidates Tend to Not Dodge Questions

This campaign season, there's been plenty of name calling and lots of accusations. David Clementson, a PhD candidate at The Ohio State University, has been keeping tabs. "I mean there was one debate where Rubio and Cruz were just all over Trump, accusing him of dodging questions."
竞选季，关于很多名字的谩骂和指控持续不断。David Clementson，是美国俄亥俄州立大学的博士生，一直在做相关的报到。“我指的是，卢比奥和克鲁兹曾一度指责特朗普逃避问题。”

[DEBATE CLIP: Rubio: "But that doesn't answer the question." TRUMP: "He didn't answer…" // Rubio: "You have yet to answer a single serious question about any of this."]
[音频片段：卢比奥：“但你并没有回答问题。”特朗普：“他没回答……”//卢比奥：“你还没有回答一个非常严肃的问题”。

Clementson wanted to see if claims of question dodging actually held up, historically—not necessarily in the unique case of Trump. So Clementson analyzed the transcripts of 14 presidential debates, from 1996 to 2012. Overall, he found 51 accusations of question dodging—26 by Dems, 25 by Republicans.
Clementson想要看看逃避问题是否真的会成为攻击点，从以往来看——针对于特朗普的独特案例，并不是这样。所以，Clementson分析了从1996年到2012年14位总统候选人之间的辩论记录。他发现，总体而言，个被回避的受指责问题——民主党占26个，共和党占25个。

A third of the time, the accused candidate did in fact go off-topic. But in every single case, the accused candidate still mentioned the question topic. Meaning that most of the time, he says, candidates are unfairly accused of question-dodging. The results are in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology.
其中，在受到指责的时间里，1/3之一的候选人的确跑题了。但是，多数时间，被指责的候选人仍然在提及相关的问题。这意味着，大部分的时间里，候选人被指责回避问题是不公平的。 该研究结果已发表在《语言和社会心理学》杂志上。

Clementson's advice for the next debate? "Just because a politician of your partisan affiliation or your party ID is telling you that the other guy can't be believed, doesn't necessarily mean that that politician is accurately detecting deception." In other words, don't trust 'em. Because the politician doing the accusing may be the one telling lies.
对于下一轮的辩论，Clementon的建议是什么呢?就是因为你的政党关系中有一位政治家或者你的政党身份告诉自己，不能够信任对方，这并不一定意味着这位政治家就真的存在欺骗行为。换而言之，千万不要相信别人说的。因为他们也有可能在撒谎。

["Lying Ted.. he's a liar."]
说谎的Ted，他就是个骗子。