陈明 编译
译者按:绝圣弃智,民利百倍;绝仁弃义,民复孝慈;绝巧弃利,盗贼无有。此三者以为文不足,故令有所属;见素抱朴,少私寡欲;绝学无忧。
Growing up working class gives people social skills that help broaden their perspective during conflicts.
成长中的工人阶级为人们提供的社交技巧,有助于他们在冲突中扩大视野。
There’s an apparent paradox in modern life: Society as a whole is getting smarter, yet we aren’t any closer to figuring out how to all get along. “How is it possible that we have just as many, if not more, conflicts as before?” asks social psychologist Igor Grossmann at the University of Waterloo in Canada.
社会心理学家伊格尔·格罗斯曼(Igor Grossmann)说:“我们的冲突怎么可能和以前一样多呢?可能更多。”
现代生活中有一个明显的悖论:整个社会变得越来越聪明,但我们依然没有找到和睦相处的方法。加拿大滑铁卢大学的The answer is that raw intelligence doesn’t reduce conflict, he asserts. Wisdom does. Such wisdom—in effect, the ability to take the perspectives of others into account and aim for compromise—comes much more naturally to those who grow up poor or working class, according to a new study by Grossman and colleagues.
他的观点是,天生的智力(intelligence)不会减少冲突。智慧(Wisdom)可以。格罗斯曼和同事最新的一项研究表明,如此的智慧其实是将他人的观点考虑进去,并达成妥协目标的能力。贫穷或工人阶级中长大的人,在这些能力上显得更为自然。
社会平均阶层越高的州,明智推理水平越低。n=每个州的参与人数。颜色代表的地区
“This work represents the cutting edge in wisdom research,” says Eranda Jayawickreme, a social psychologist at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
北卡罗莱纳州温斯顿-塞勒姆维克森林大学的社会心理学家埃兰达·贾亚维克雷姆(Eranda Jayawickreme)说:“这项工作占据了智慧研究的前沿”。
To conduct the study, Grossmann and his graduate student Justin Brienza embarked on a two-part experiment. First, they asked 2145 people throughout the United States to take an online survey. Participants were asked to remember a recent conflict they had with someone, such as an argument with a spouse or a fight with a friend. They then answered 20 questions applicable to that or any conflict, including: “Did you ever consider a third-party perspective?” “How much did you try to understand the other person’s viewpoint?” and “Did you consider that you might be wrong?”
为了进行这项研究,格罗斯曼和他的研究生贾斯汀·布里恩扎(Justin Brienza)开始了两部分的实验。首先,他们在美国向2145人进行在线调查。要求参与者回忆最近和别人发生的冲突,比如和配偶的争吵,或者和朋友的打架。然后,他们回答了20个适用于这一问题或任何冲突的问题,包括:你是否考虑过第三方的观点?你试图理解对方观点的程度有多少?你认为你错了吗?
Grossmann and Brienza crunched the data and assigned the participants both a “wise reasoning” score based on the conflict answers and a “social class” score, then plotted the two scores against one another. They found that people with the lowest social class scores—those with less income, less education, and more worries about money—scored about twice as high on the wise reasoning scale as those in the highest social class. The income and education levels ranged from working class to upper middle class; neither the very wealthy nor the very poor were well represented in the study.
量表上的得分是社会最高阶层的两倍。研究还发现,收入和教育水平在工人阶级和上层中产阶级之间是不等的;无论是富人还是穷人都在这项研究中表现得都很好。
格罗斯曼和布里恩扎分析了数据,并且根据冲突的答案和“社会阶层”得分为参与者分配一个“明智的推理”得分,然后将这两个分数相互对照。他们发现,社会等级最低的人得分较低,收入较少,受教育程度低,对金钱的担忧更大,他们在明智推理In the second part of the experiment, the duo recruited 200 people in and around Ann Arbor, Michigan, to take a standard IQ test and read three letters to the Dear Abby advice column. One letter, for example, asked about choosing sides in an argument between mutual friends. Each participant then discussed with an interviewer how they thought the situations outlined in the letters would play out. A panel of judges scored their responses according to various measures of wise reasoning. In the example above, thinking about how an outsider might view the conflict would earn points toward wisdom, whereas relying only on one’s own perspective would not.