新视野大学英语第四册-unit1B-Why-do-smart-people-do-dumb-things.docx

Why do smart people do dumb things?聪明人为何会做蠢事？Orthodox views prize intelligence and intellectual rigor highly in the modern realm of universities and tech industry jobs. One of the underlying assumptions of this value system is that smart people, by virtue of what theyve learned, will formulate better decisions. Often this is true. Yet psychologists who study human decision making processes have uncovered cognitive biases common to all people, regardless of intelligence, that can lead to poor decisions in experts and laymen alike.传统观念将智力和思维的缜密性看作现代大学领域和科技产业工作的重要素质。这一价值体系所隐含的前提是，聪明人借助自己丰富的学识会作出更高明的决定。在大多数情况下，确实如此。但是，研究人类决策过程的心理学家们却发现了每个人身上都常见的“认知偏差”。不管智力水平如何，这些认知偏差都会引导人们作出错误的决定，不论他们是专家还是门外汉。Thankfully these biases can be avoided. Understanding how and in what situations they occur can give you an awareness of your own limitations and allow you to factor them into your decision-making.好在这些偏差是可以避免的。只要知道这些偏差如何及在何种情况下发生，你就能意识到自身的缺陷，并在决策过程中考虑到这些因素的影响。One of the most common biases is what is known as the fundamental attribution error. Through this people attribute the failures of others to character flaws and their own to mere circumstance, subconsciously considering their own characters to be stainless. Jenkins lost his job because of his incompetence; I lost mine because of the recession. It also leads us to attribute our own success to our qualifications, discounting luck, while seeing others success as the product of mere luck.最常见的偏差之一就是通常所说的“基本归因错误”。犯这种错误的人会将别人的失败归因于性格缺陷，而将自己的失败仅仅归因于周遭环境，潜意识中认为自己的性格是完美无瑕的。“詹金斯丢掉了工作是因为他能力太差，我丢掉了工作则是因为经济衰退。”同样，这种偏差也会让我们将自己的成功归功于自身素质而不是运气，而将别人的成功仅仅看作是运气使然。In other words, we typically demand more accountability from others than we do from ourselves. Not only does this lead to petty judgments about other people, it also leads to faulty risk assessment when you assume that certain bad things only happen to others. For example, you might assume, without evidence, that the price of your house will go up even though 90 percent of them have drop