Who are you really? Is there a “true you” beneath the masquerade? According to a trio of psychologists and philosophers writing in Perspectives on Psychological Science, the idea that we each have a hidden true or authentic self is an incredibly common folk belief, and moreover, the way most of us think about these true selves is remarkably consistent, even across different cultures, from Westeros to Tibet.
你到底是谁,在伪装的面具之下,是否有一个“真正的你”?根据三位心理学家和哲学家从心理学角度来看,我们每个人都有一个隐藏的真实的或真诚的自我的想法是一种难以置信的普通的民间信仰,而且,我们大多数人都认为这些真实的自我是非常一致的方式,甚至在跨文化的背景之中——从《权利的游戏》中的维斯洛特大陆到西藏——都是如此。
This makes the concept of a true self useful because it helps explain many of the judgments we make about ourselves and others. Yet, from a scientific perspective, there is actually no such thing as the true self. “The notion that there are especially authentic parts of the self, and that these parts can remain cloaked from view indefinitely, borders on the superstitious,” write Nina Strohminger and her colleagues at Yale University.
这使得真正自我的概念很有用,因为它有助于解释我们对自己和他人做出的许多判断。然而,从科学的角度来看,事实上并没有真正的自我。耶鲁大学的Nina Strohminger及其同事说,“认为有特别真实的自我部分,以及这些部分可以保持无限期的隐形下去的看法,是和迷信接壤的。”
One way that psychologists have investigated people’s views of the true self is to ask them to consider that a person has changed in various ways – either their memories, or their preferences, or their morals, or their personality, for example – and then ask them after which change has the person’s true self most been altered. The results are incredibly consistent: people most consider that the true self has been altered if a person’s moral sense is changed. In other words, most of us believe that the true self is the moral self. This also manifests in the common reluctance we have to consider taking hypothetical drugs that might alter our moral judgments (more so than our reluctance to take drugs that would alter our personality, for instance).
心理学家有一种方法来研究人们对真实自我的看法,即,要求他们考虑一个人的各种变化:他们记忆的改变,或自己的喜好,或他们的道德,或者他们的个性,例如,然后随后问他们,他的真实自我有哪些部分发生了改变。一致性的结果令人难以置信:人们都认为,如果一个人的道德观念发生改变,真正的自我就会改变。换句话说,我们大多数人都相信,真正的自我就是道德的自我。这也体现在我们不情愿地考虑服用那些可能会改变我们道德判断的假想药物之中(这比我们不情愿服用能改变我们性格的药物更为重要)。
Related to this, explain Strohminger and her co-authors, is that most of us seem to be biased to see our own and other people’s true selves as essentially good. When a bad person turns good, we see this as their true self emerging. Conversely, if a good person turns bad, this is because circumstances have conspired to constrain or corrupt their true self.