雅思课外读物--Why are we so gullible（易受骗的）?

2016年04月15日11:20 来源：互联网

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现在还是4月，你是否成了四月愚人（April Fool)？反思之余，让我们总结一下，自己当初为什么就那样轻信（gullible)？文章很贴心，附有注解，大家有看不懂的地方可以参考，最后又文章出现的雅思词汇，大家可以记忆，一起来看看今天的雅思阅读文章。

If you ever need proof of human gullibility(易上当，轻信), cast your mind back to the attack of the flesh-eating bananas. In January 2000, a series of chain emails began reporting that imported bananas were infecting people with “necrotizing fasciitis” – a rare disease in which the skin erupts into livid(青紫色的)purple boils before disintegrating and peeling away from muscle and bone.

According to the email chain, the FDA was trying to cover up the epidemic(流行病) to avoid panic. Faced with the threat, readers were encouraged to spread the word to their friends and family.

The threat was pure nonsense, of course. But by 28 January, the concern was great enough for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to issue a statement decrying(谴责;反对)the rumour.

Did it help? Did it heck. Rather than quelling the rumour, they had only poured fuel on its flames. Within weeks, the CDC was hearing from so many distressed callers it had to set up abanana hotline. The facts became so distorted(歪曲的) that people eventually started to quote the CDC as the source of the rumour. Even today, new variants(变体) of the myth have occasionally reignited those old fears.

The banana apocalypse(末日;大灾难) may seem comical in hindsight, but the same cracks in our rational thinking can have serious, even dangerous, consequences.

We may laugh at these far-fetched(子虚乌有的) urban myths – as ridiculous as the ongoing theory that Paul McCartney, Miley Cyrus and Megan Fox have all been killed and replaced with lookalikes. But the same cracks in our logic allow the propagation of far more dangerous ideas, such as the belief that HIV is harmless and vitamin supplements can cure AIDS, that 9/11 was an ‘inside job’ by the US government, or that a tinfoil(锡箔)hat will stop the FBI from reading your thoughts.

Why do so many false beliefs persist in the face of hard evidence? And why do attempts to deny them only add grist to the rumour mill? It's not a question of intelligence – even Nobel Prize winners have fallen for some bizarre(奇怪的) and baseless theories. But a series of recent psychological advances may offer some answers, showing how easy it is to construct a rumour that bypasses(绕开) the brain’s deception filters.

One, somewhat humbling, explanation is that we are all “cognitive misers” – to save time and energy, our brains use intuition rather than analysis.

As a simple example, quickly answer the following questions:

“How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the Ark?”

“Margaret Thatcher was the president of what country?”

Between 10 and 50% of study participants presented with these questions fail to notice that it was Noah, not Moses, who built the Ark, and that Margaret Thatcher was the prime minster, not the president – even when they have been explicitly(明确地) asked to note inaccuracies.

Known as the “Moses illusion”, this absentmindedness illustrates just how easily we miss the details of a statement, favouring the general gist in place of the specifics. Instead, we normally just judge whether it “feels” right or wrong before accepting or rejecting its message. “Even when we ‘know’ we should be drawing on facts and evidence, we just draw on feelings,” says Eryn Newman at the University of Southern California, whose forthcoming paper summarises the latest research on misinformation.

Based on the research to date, Newman suggests our gut reactions swivel(旋转) around just five simple questions:

· Does a fact come from a credible source?

· Do others believe it?

· Is there plenty of evidence to support it?

· Is it compatible with what I believe?

· Does it tell a good story?

Crucially, our responses to each of these points can be swayed by frivolous(轻率的，不重要的), extraneous(外在的), details that have nothing to do with the truth.

Consider the questions of whether others believe a statement or not, and whether the source is credible. We tend to trust people who are familiar to us, meaning that the more we see a talking head, the more we will begrudgingly(不情愿地)start to believe what they say. “The fact that they aren’t an expert won’t even come into our judgement of the truth,” says Newman. What’s more, we fail to keep count of the number of people supporting a view; when that talking head repeats their idea on endless news programmes, it creates the illusion that the opinion is more popular and pervasive(普遍的) than it really is. Again, the result is that we tend to accept it as the truth.

Sticky nuggets

Then there’s the “cognitive fluency” of a statement – essentially, whether it tells a good, coherent story that is simple to imagine. “If something feels smooth and easy to process, then our default(默认) is to expect things to be true,” says Newman. This is particularly true if a myth easily fits with our expectations. “It has to be sticky – a nugget or soundbite that links to what you know, and reaffirms your beliefs,” agrees Stephan Lewandowsky at the University of Bristol in the UK, whose work has examined the psychology of climate change deniers.

A slick(熟练的;机灵的) presentation will instantly boost the cognitive fluency of a claim, while raising its believability. In one recent study, Newman presented participants with an article (falsely) saying that a well-known rock singer was dead. The subjects were more likely to believe the claim if the article was presented next to a picture of him, simply because it became easier to bring the singer to mind – boosting the cognitive fluency of the statement.(如果在这篇文章的旁边配上他的照片，受试者就更容易相信这个说法，因为照片更容易让他们想起这位歌手来--从而提高了这个说法的认知流畅度。) Similarly, writing in an easy-to-read font, or speaking with good enunciation, have been shown to increase cognitive fluency; indeed, Newman has shown that something as seemingly inconsequential(不重要的) as the sound of someone’s name can sway us; the easier it is to pronounce, the more likely we are to accept their judgement.

In light of(根据) these discoveries, you can begin to understand why the fear of the flesh-eating bananas was so infectious(传染性的). For one thing, the chain emails were coming from people you inherently trust – your friends – increasing the credibility of the claim, and making it appear more popular. The concept itself was vivid and easy to picture – it had high cognitive fluency. If you happened to distrust the FDA and the government, the thought of a cover-up would have fitted neatly into your worldview.

That cognitive miserliness can also help explain why those attempts to correct a myth have backfired(逆火;适得其反) so spectacularly, as the CDC found to their cost. Lab experiments confirm that offering counter-evidence only strengthens someone’s conviction. “In as little as 30 minutes, you can see a bounce-back effect where people are even more likely to believe the statement is true,” says Newman.