为什么我们要撒如此多的谎呢?
爱思英语编者按:罗伯特·费尔德曼是马萨诸塞大学的一位心理学教授。他学术生涯中的大部分时间都在研究“欺骗”在人与人关系中扮演的角色。费尔德曼的新书《你生活中的谎言:谎言如何欺骗了我们以及它影射出的我们自己》不客气地阐述了如今撒谎是一种多么普遍的现象。他接受了《时代周刊》的采访,谈到为什么我们都需要那么一点儿 “诚实”。 A professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts, Robert Feldman has spent most of his career studying the role deception plays in human relationships. His most recent book, The Liar in Your Life: How Lies Work and What They Tell Us About Ourselves, lays out in stark terms just how prevalent lying has become. He talked to TIME about why we all need a dose of honesty. What are the main findings of your research? One of the reasons people get away with so much lying, your research suggests, is that we are all essentially dupes. Why do we believe so many lies? This is what I call the liar's advantage. We are not very good at detecting deception in other people. When we are trying to detect honesty, we look at the wrong kinds of nonverbal behaviors, and we misinterpret them. The problem is that there is no direct correlation between someone's nonverbal behavior and their honesty. "Shiftiness" could also be the result of being nervous, angry, distracted or sad. Even trained interrogators [aren't] able to detect deception at [high] rates. You might as well flip a coin to determine if someone is being honest. What's more, a lot of the time, we don't want to detect lies in other people. We are unwilling to put forward the cognitive effort to suspect the veracity of statements, and we aren't motivated to question people when they tell us things we want to hear. When we ask someone, "How are you doing?" and they say, "Fine," we really don't want to know what their aches and pains are. So we take "Fine" at face value. Do you feel deception is a particularly relevant topic to our society? 更多信息请访问:http://www.engbus.cn/ You can make the assumption that because it often makes social interactions go more smoothly, lying is O.K. But there is a cost to even seemingly benign lies. If people are always telling you that you look terrific and you did a great job on that presentation, there's no way to have an accurate understanding of yourself. Lies put a smudge on an interaction, and if it's easy to lie to people in minor ways, it becomes easier to lie in bigger ways. You say in the book that recent DNA evidence suggests that 10% of people have fathers other than the men they believe conceived them. So is lying pretty widespread in our intimate lives too? You show how lying is a social skill. Does that mean it's part of an evolutionary legacy? In your book, you offer a way to cut back on lies. What's the "AHA!" remedy? |