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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 frequent-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.
Which of the following statements can be inferred from the passage?
选项 A、A good understanding of human psychology can help government in policymaking.
B、Rewarding mechanism should replace punishment mechanism in public management.
C、Frequent-flyer-type reward program is proposed to overcome the defects in lottery reward program.
D、By making good citizenship more fun, the fun theory also makes civic behavior more utilitarian.
答案A
解析 [A]选项正确。因为人人都喜欢奖励，不喜欢惩罚，因此利用人类的这种心理设置的趣味公民项目大获成功，因此政府要是能够正确把握人们的心理，往往可以制定出更好的政策。[B]选项错误。奖励机制在公共管理方面确实能够取得意想不到的效果，但是文中并没有就此宣称奖励机制可以用来全面替代惩罚机制，例如在超速管理方面，文中提到的解决方案就融合了奖励机制和惩罚机制。[C]选项错误。最后一段中提到的飞行常客类型的奖励项目(即通过积分兑换的方式激励公民行为)是除了彩票奖励项目之外另一种有效地激励公民行为的方法，作者并没有说飞行常客项目是为了克服彩票奖励项目的弱点提出来的。[D]选项讲的是趣味公民项目可能导致的负面效应，但是文中并没有提到这种效应，属于过度引申。
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