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

admin2021-06-15  59
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.
What does "such altruism" (in bold) in the last paragraph refer to?
选项 A、The real and universal ones that happen often in our lives.
B、People do good things to those who they will never meet.
C、People do good things to themselves.
D、People do the right thing to those who are their friends.
答案B
解析 含义题。题干：最后一段中的“such altruism”(粗体部分)指的是什么?此类含义题要猜出正确意思，不仅要理解该词所在句的含义，还要联系前后文，结合排除法从而选出正确答案。根据猜测词定位至文章最后一段倒数第二句“Be that as it may，as this study shows，such altruism is real and universal.(尽管如此，正如这项研究表明，such altruism是真实和普遍的)”，由此可知，such altruism指代的内容应该在定位句的前文。该段第二、三句谈到“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.(但是通过‘做正确的事’所带来的内心安逸也是一个强大的动力。这种利他主义是如何进化来的，生物学家和人类学家对此进行了激烈的讨论——尤其是当它发生在陌生人身上时，比如在科恩博士的实验中，而这些陌生人是利他主义者根本就没想过会遇到的)”。由此可知，在这项研究中，such altruism指的就是人们把钱包归还给钱包的主人，而钱包的主人是他们可能永远也不会遇到的陌生人。A项“我们生活中经常发生的真实而普遍的事情”，没有指出such altruism的具体行为是什么，太宽泛，可排除。B项“人们对那些他们永远不会遇见的人做善事”，即利他主义，符合文意。C项“人们对自己做好事”、D项“人们对他们的朋友做正确的事”，没有体现出do good things to strangers，谈不上是利他行为，故均可排除。故本题选B。
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