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  3. Governments typically use two tools to encourage citizens to engage in civic behavior like paying their taxes, driving safely or

Governments typically use two tools to encourage citizens to engage in civic behavior like paying their taxes, driving safely or

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问题     Governments typically use two tools to encourage citizens to engage in civic behavior like paying their taxes, driving safely or recycling their garbage: exhortation and fines. These efforts are often ineffective. As every successful parent learns, one way to encourage good behavior, from room-cleaning to tooth-brushing, is to make it fun. Not surprisingly, the same principle applies to adults.
    In this spirit, the Swedish division of Volkswagen has sponsored an initiative they call The Fun Theory. Their first project is to get people to use a set of stairs rather than the escalator that ran alongside it. By transforming the stairs into a piano-style keyboard such that walking on the steps produced notes, they made using the stairs fun, and they found that stair use increased by 66 percent.
    The musical stairs idea is more amusing than practical, so The Fun Theory sponsored a contest to generate other ideas. The winning entry suggested offering both positive and negative reinforcement to encourage safe driving. Specifically, a camera would measure the speed of passing cars. Speeders would be issued fines but some of the fine revenues would be distributed via lottery to drivers who were observed obeying the speed limit. A short test of the idea offered promising results.
    This example illustrates an important behavioral point; many people love lotteries. In using lotteries to motivate it is important to get the details right. Participants are likely to find a lottery more enticing if they find out that they would have won. The Dutch government uses this principle very effectively. One of its state lotteries is based on postal codes. If your postal code is announced as the winner, you know that you would have won had you only bought a ticket. The idea is to play on people’s feelings of regret.
    Lotteries are just one way to provide positive reinforcement. Their power comes from the fact that the chance of winning the prize is overvalued. Of course you can simply pay people for doing the right thing, but if the payment is small, it could well backfire. (If the total non-speeding-prize money had been divided up evenly among all those who drove within speed limit, I estimate that the price paid would have been about 25 cents per driver. Would anyone bother for that?)
    An alternative to lotteries is a trequent-flyer-type reward program, where the points can be (redeemed for something fun. A free goodie can be a better inducement than cash since it offers that rarest of commodities, a guilt-free pleasure. This sort of reward system has been successfully used in England to encourage recycling. In the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead outside of London, citizens could sign up for a rewards program in which they earned points depending on the weight of the material they recycled. The points were good for discounts at merchants in the area. Recycling increased by 35 percent. The moral here is simple. If governments want to encourage good citizenship, they should try making the desired behavior more fun.
Compared with lottery, smallprizes for every good conduct as an incentive to encourage good citizenship may work______.
选项 A、more fairly
B、less efficiently
C、more justifiably
D、less feasibly
答案B
解析 题干中的small prizes for every good conduct的意思是“为每一个表现良好的人发放小额的奖金”。用彩票激励正面行为的方式固然有效，但是不是给每一个表现好的人发放小额奖金的方式更公平，效果也更好呢?作者在第五段中做出了回答。作者在第五段中提到，彩票的力量来自于人们往往夸大自己中奖的几率(Their power comes from the fact that the chance of winning the prize is overvalued)。而如果给每个人发放奖金，这样的方法可能会有负面作用(it could well backfire)。作者给出了一个例子，上文提到对超速的人罚款，将罚款金额转换成彩票给予遵守交通规则的人抽奖机会会激励人们的正面行为，在这个案例中如果将彩票变成小额奖金发给每一个遵守交通规则的人，估计每一个表现良好的司机只能得到25美分，这么点钱在激励良好行为方面能有什么诱惑力呢?因此，在作者看来，给每一个表现良好的人发放小额奖金的办法和彩票相比，在激励公民行为方面效果可能没有那么好。正确答案应该选[B]。
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