Like the flu, a person’s emotional state can be contagious. Watch someone cry, and you’ll likely feel sad; think about the elder

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问题    Like the flu, a person’s emotional state can be contagious. Watch someone cry, and you’ll likely feel sad; think about the elderly, and you’ll tend to walk slower. Now a study suggests that we can also catch someone else’s irrational thought processes.
   Anyone who’s lost money on a house in need of repair may have succumbed to a classic economic fallacy known as "sunk costs." You make a bad investment in a home that’s never going to sell for more than you put in to it, yet you want to justify your investment by continuing to throw money into renovations. One way to avoid this hole is to get advice from someone who has no self-interest in the project. But is the outsider still somehow susceptible to your mindset?
   To find out, social psychologist Adam Galinsky of Northwestern University and colleagues asked college students to take over decision-making for a person they had never met—and who they didn’t know was fake. The volunteers were split into two groups: one that felt some connection with the decisionmaker and another that didn’t.
   In one experiment, the volunteers watched the following scenario play out via text on a computer screen: the fake decision-maker tried to outbid another person for a prize of 356 points, which equaled $4.45 in real money. The decision-maker started out with 360 points, and every time the other bidder raised the stakes by 40 points, the decision-maker followed suit. Volunteers were told that once the decision-maker bid over 356 points, he or she would begin to lose some of the $12 payment for participating in the study.
   When the decision-maker neared this threshold, the volunteers were asked to take over bidding. Objectively, the volunteers should have realized that—like the person who makes a bad investment in a house—the decision-maker would keep throwing good money after bad. But the volunteers who felt identification with the fake player made almost 60% more bids and were more likely to lose money than those who didn’t feel a connection.
   Galinsky believes that the results suggest that companies trying to reverse results of bad decisions should find true outsiders. He points to troubled automaker Ford as an example. Instead of hiring from within—as General Motors (GM) recently did—Ford made Alan Mulally from Boeing, an aerospace company, their chief executive officer. Many experts believe that Ford is now recovering quicker than GM. "It’s true that insiders have more knowledge," Galinsky says. "But when you are already down the road of a failed course of action, you really need... a true outsider."
According to a study, another person’s irrational mindset is characterized as _____.

选项 A、emotional
B、infectious
C、justifiable
D、susceptible

答案B

解析 事实细节题。根据irrational一词定位文章第一段。其中最后一句话提到“一项研究表明我们可能‘感染’别人的非理性思维过程”,由此可知B项“有感染力的”最符合题意,与文中的contagious同义。
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