“我们看到蜘蛛是在实验室里,我真的非常害怕这种生物。因此我就冲她大喊大叫让她把蜘蛛弄走,因为她不害怕。”
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev psychologist Tali Leibovich, talking about herself and a colleague.
班古里昂大学的内盖夫心理学家塔里·勒博维奇谈论着自己和同事的经历。
“And she said, but it's small, how come you're afraid of it?
“我的同事说,蜘蛛那么小的个头,你怎么会害怕呢?
And I said, no it's huge! And she said 'it's small; I said it's huge.
而我说,不,它很大的!她说蜘蛛很小,但我则说很大。
We started arguing, and this is why we started this study. To see who is right."
随后我们开始争论起来。而为了证明孰是孰非,我们开始了这项研究。
Leibovich does not ordinarily study spiders.
勒博维奇并没有按照常理出牌去研究蜘蛛。
But this spider encounter made her curious about how the human brain understands magnitude—what are the factors that influence our estimation of how big or small something is?
但这次被蜘蛛吓到的经历让她对人类的大脑如何理解大小产生好奇—究竟是哪些因素对我们评判事物大小的标准产生影响呢?
And does fear play a role?
恐惧是否也在其中起到关键作用呢?
So she and colleagues did an experiment in which participants had to say how big a spider in a photo was on a scale from housefly to goat.
因此她和同事们进行了一项实验,参与其中的试验者们必须说出照片中从家蝇到山羊相大小的蜘蛛到底有多大。