Smart people tend to perform better at work, earn more money, be physically healthier, and be less likely to subscribe to authoritarian beliefs. But a new paper reveals that a key aspect of intelligence – a strong “pattern-matching” ability, which helps someone readily learn a language, understand how another person is feeling or spot a stock market trend to exploit – has a darker side: it also makes that person more likely to learn and apply social stereotypes.
新的研究表明了智力的一个重要面向。聪明的人有强大的“模式匹配”的能力,这种能力可以帮助人们轻松地学习语言,了解另一个人的感觉,或者发现股票市场的趋势并加以利用。同时,这种能力也有黑暗的一面:这也使得人更容易学习和运用社会刻板印象。
聪明的人在工作中表现更好,挣更多的钱,身体更健康,他们也不太可能同意独裁者的信仰。但一个Previous studies exploring how a person’s cognitive abilities may affect their attitudes to other people have produced mixed results. But this might be because the questions asked in these studies were too broad.
认知能力在影响对别人的态度时是如何产生了不同的结果。这种影响可能是因为,在这些研究中提出的问题过于宽泛。
以前的研究探讨了一个人的In the new study, published in the Journal of Experimental Biology, David Lick, Adam Alter and Jonathan Freeman at New York University decided to home in on social stereotyping. “Because pattern detection is a core component of human intelligence, people with superior cognitive abilities may be equipped to efficiently learn and use stereotypes about social groups,” they theorised.
在《实验生物学》杂志上发表的这项新研究中,纽约大学的David Lick、Adam Alter和Jonathan Freeman将研究的目标对准了社会刻板印象。他们的理论是:“由于模式检查是人类智力的核心成分,具有较高认知能力的人可能会更有效地学习和利用社会刻板印象。”
To explore this, they conducted a total of six online studies involving 1,257 people recruited via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk survey website. In the first two studies, volunteers saw pictures of aliens that varied on four dimensions (colour, face shape, eye size, ears), with most of the blue aliens paired with an “unfriendly” behaviour (like “spat in another alien’s face”) and most of the yellow aliens paired with a friendly behaviour (like “gave another alien a bouquet of flowers”). The volunteers also completed items from Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices, which assesses pattern-matching ability.
为了探索刻板印象的这个作用,他们通过亚马逊“机械土耳其人”调查网站一共进行了六项在线调查,涉及了1257人。在第一个研究中,志愿者们看到的外星人图片在四个维度上进行了变化(颜色、脸型、眼睛大小、耳朵)。大部分的蓝色外星人和“不友好”的行为相匹配(如“啐另一个外星人的脸”),同时,大部分的黄色外星人和“友好”的行为相匹配(例如“送另一个陌生一束鲜花”)。志愿者们还完成了瑞文高级推理测试,该测试用来评估模式匹配的能力。
A subsequent memory test involved the same participants attempting to pair previously seen faces with their earlier behaviours, but there were also some new blue and yellow faces that actually they hadn’t seen before. Participants who were better at pattern-matching were more likely to attribute unfriendly behaviours to new blue aliens than to new yellow aliens – suggesting that they’d learned colour–behaviour stereotypes more readily, and applied them.
在随后的记忆测试中,同一参与者试图将他们早期的行为和之前看到的面孔进行匹配,但也有一些他们以前确实没有见过的新的蓝色和黄色的面孔。那些比较擅长模式匹配的参与者,更倾向于把不友好的行为归因于新的蓝色外星人而不是新的黄色外星人,这表明,他们更容易学习颜色-行为模式的刻板印象,并应用它们。
In studies three and four, volunteers were instead shown realistic pictures of male human faces. The displays were manipulated, so that most of the faces with a wide nose (for some participants) or a narrow nose (for others) were paired with negative behaviours – like “laughed and jeered at a homeless person”. Most of the faces with the other nose type were paired with friendly behaviours – like “sent flowers to someone who was sick”.
在研究三和研究四中,取而代之的是向志愿者们展示男性面孔的真实照片。显示器的图片在暗中操纵了,这使得大部分的脸型有着一个大鼻子(展现给部分参与者)或窄鼻(展现给别的人),这两种图片都和“取笑并嘲笑一个流浪汉”这样的消极行为相配。有着其他类型鼻子的其他脸型和友好的行为相匹配,如“送花给生病的人”。
After viewing the faces, the volunteers played a trust game involving sharing money. They were led to believe this was an unrelated interlude in the study. Before the game began, they chose an avatar from a large group of faces to represent them online. They then played 12 rounds of what they believed was a real game, each time with a different partner who was represented by their own avatar.
看完这些面孔后,志愿者们玩了一个分享钱的信托游戏。研究者让他们相信,这个游戏与本次研究无关。游戏开始前,他们从一大堆图片中选择了一个头像来代表他们的在线形象。然后他们玩了12轮他们认为是一场真正的比赛,每一次都有一个不同的伙伴,这些伙伴以他们的头像来代表。
In fact, the volunteers weren’t playing with real partners, and the experimenters manipulated the “partners’'” avatar photos, so that some had wider noses, and some had narrower noses (there were also female “partners” whose nose width did not systematically vary). The team found that volunteers who did better on the test of pattern detection gave less money to partners whose avatars had a nose width related, in the earlier trial, to unfriendly behaviour.