People Are More Honest than They Think They Are Imagine that you found a wallet in the street containing a stranger’s co

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问题                                              People Are More Honest than They Think They Are
        Imagine that you found a wallet in the street containing a stranger’s contact details but no cash. Would you go out of your way to return it to its owner? Now imagine that the same wallet contained a few crisp banknotes. Would that alter your response? Does it depend on the amount of money? And how do you think other people would react in similar circumstances?
        Honesty makes the world go round. Without people trusting in one another, at least to a certain extent, society would fall apart. Honesty is therefore studied academically. Most work in the area, though, takes place under controlled conditions in laboratories. Moreover, it often features well-off and well-educated Westerners as its subjects. By contrast Alain Cohn of the University of Michigan and his colleagues have taken such behavioral economics around the world.
        As the team report this week in Science, from Canada to Thailand and from Russia to Peru, Dr. Cohn’s research assistants entered public buildings like banks, museums and police stations. They handed in a dummy wallet to an employee in the reception area, saying they had found it on the street outside, before making a hasty exit. Each wallet was a see-through plastic card case containing three identical business cards (with a unique email address and a fictitious native man’s name), a shopping list (in the local language) and a key. Crucially, some wallets also included $13.45 in the local currency, while some had no cash. Then, the team simply waited to see who would email the "owner" about returning the wallet.
        In 38 of the 40 countries, the wallets with money in them were returned more often than those without (51% of the time, compared with 40% for the cashless). While rates of honesty varied greatly between different places (Scandinavia most honest, Asia and Africa least), the difference within individual countries between the two return rates was quite stable around that figure of 11 percentage points. In addition, wallets containing a larger sum of money ($94.15) were even more likely (by about another ten percentage points) to be returned than those with less, although the "big money" experiment was done in only three countries —at least when it comes to lost wallets and petty cash Intriguingly, though, such personal probity is not reflected in people’s expectations of their fellow men and women. When Dr. Cohn and his team surveyed a sample of 299 (admittedly exclusively American) volunteers, most respondents predicted that the more money there was in a wallet the more likely it was that it would be kept. They also asked the question of 279 top academic economists, who did only marginally better than the man or woman in the street at getting the answer right.
        A certain cynicism about the motives of others is probably good for survival, so the response of the general population may be understandable. But the warm inner glow derived from "doing the right thing" is also a powerful motivator. How this altruism evolved is much debated by biologists and anthropologists—particularly when it extends, as in Dr. Cohn’s experiments, to strangers whom the altruist has no expectation of ever meeting. Be that as it may, as this study shows, such altruism is real and universal. The study also suggests, from the responses they gave, that quite a few e conomists have not yet truly taken this point on board.
In which way was Alain Cohn and his colleagues’ study different from most of other studies about honesty?

选项 A、It studied on honesty by testing whether people would return others’ wallets.
B、It mainly studied those rich and educated people in the west of the world.
C、They collected data among different kinds of people around the world.
D、It was done through experiments in labs instead of real-life situations.

答案C

解析 细节题。题干:阿兰·科恩和他的同事的研究与其他大多数关于诚信的研究在哪方面有所不同?题干关键词为different from most of other studies,定位到文章第二段,该段提到,诚信问题被学术界研究然而,该领域的大多数工作都是在实验室的受控条件下进行的,而且通常以富裕和受过良好教育的西方人为研究对象相比之下,密歇根大学的阿兰·科恩和他的同事们在世界各地研究了这种行为经济学。由此可知,不同之处在于科恩和他的同事的研究是以世界各地不同人群为研究对象,故C项“他们收集了世界各地不同人群的数据”符合题意。A项“它通过测试人们是否会归还别人的钱包来研究诚信问题”,其它大多数研究是否采取这种行为来测试人们的诚信问题,文中没有提及,所以排除A项。B项“它主要研究的是西方那些富有和受过教育的人”和D项“实验是在实验室里进行的,而不是在现实生活中”是其它大多数关于诚信的研究的特点,B、D两项错误。故本题选C
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