爲什麼人們會覺得"不公平"?
Science and technology.
科技
Psychology
心理
Snot fair!
太不公平啦！
Exactly when is something perceived as "not fair"?
究竟在什麼情況下人們會覺得"不公平"？
AS THE bankster phenomenon has so eloquently illustrated, Homo sapiens is exquisitely sensitive to injustice. Many people grudgingly tolerated the astronomical incomes of financial traders, and even the cosmological ones of banks' chief executives, when they thought those salaries were earned by honest labour. Now, so many examples to the contrary have emerged that toleration has vanished.
強盜銀行家的現象已經有力地證明，人類對於不公平是敏感至極的。過去，許多人對於操盤手高到天上去的收入，甚至是銀行高管天文數字一般的薪酬，雖慍慍不平，但尚能忍耐，他們曾以爲這些收入是靠誠實勞動賺來的。但如今，隨着大量反例的出現，公衆的忍耐已經不復存在。
Surprisingly, however, the psychological underpinnings of a sense of injustice-in particular, what triggers willingness to punish an offender, even at a cost to the punisher-have not been well established. But a recent experiment by Nichola Raihani of University College, London, and Katherine McAuliffe of Harvard, just published in Biology Letters, attempts to disentangle the matter.
然而讓人驚訝的是，心理學上對於不公平感的成因尚未能做出很好的解釋，尤其是爲何人們不惜付出代價也要懲罰侵犯者。但是，英國倫敦大學學院的尼古拉·雷漢尼（Nichola Raihani）和哈佛大學的凱瑟琳·麥考利夫（Katherine McAuliffe）最近進行的一項實驗嘗試對這個問題抽絲剝縷，這一實驗的結果發表在了最近的《生物學快報》上。
Dr Raihani and Ms McAuliffe tested two competing hypotheses. One is that the desire to punish is simple revenge for an offence. The other is that it is related to the offence's consequences-specifically, whether or not the offender is left better off than the victim.
雷漢尼博士和麥考利夫女士對兩種對立的猜想進行了驗證。第一種猜想認爲，懲罰侵犯者的慾望只是一種報復心理。另一種猜想則認爲這與侵犯的結果有關--具體來說，即侵犯者的境況是否比受害者更好。
Until recently, the temptation would have been to advertise for undergraduate volunteers for such a project. Instead, Dr Raihani and Ms McAuliffe decided to follow a new fashion in psychology and recruit their human guinea pigs through a system called Mechanical Turk. This arrangement, run by Amazon, a large internet firm, pays people registered with it (known as Turkers) small sums of money to do jobs for others. That allowed the two researchers not only to gather many more volunteers (560) than would have been possible from the average student body, but also to spread the profile of those volunteers beyond the halls of academe and beyond the age of 21.
一直到最近，像這樣的項目往往會通過廣告吸引大學生志願者。但是雷漢尼博士和麥考利夫女士決定採取心理學界新近流行的一種方法，藉由一個叫做"機械土耳其"的系統招收他們實驗的小白鼠。這一系統由網絡巨頭亞馬遜公司組織，註冊用戶（被稱作"特客（Turker）"）爲別人工作後可以領到小額的酬勞。通過這個系統，兩位研究者不僅找到了比普通學生羣體更多的志願者（560名），還得以將志願者的範圍擴大到了學術界以外和21歲以上的人羣。
Dr Raihani and Ms McAuliffe asked their Turkers to play a game. In it, the volunteers were paired and given small sums of money. One member of a pair could then take a predefined sum from the other, or not, as he chose. After that the other could, at a certain cost to himself, impoverish his opponent to a greater degree.
雷漢尼博士和麥考利夫女士請參與實驗的特客玩了一個遊戲。在遊戲中，志願者以兩人一組一一配對，並各自獲得一小筆錢。組裏的一名志願者可以選擇是否從另一名組員那裏拿走預定數量的錢。之後，另一位組員在自己付出一定代價的前提下，可以大量減少對方的財產。
The first player might receive ten cents, 30 cents or 70 cents. The second player always received 70 cents. The first player was then allowed to take 20 cents of the second player's money. Finally, the second player could reduce the first player's total sum by 30 cents, but at a cost of ten cents to himself-in other words, he lost money too by doing so.
每一組的遊戲者甲最開始可能會收到10美分、30美分或是70美分作爲起始財產。而遊戲者乙則總會收到70美分。然後甲被允許先從乙處取走20美分。最後乙可以選擇使甲的財產減少30美分，但是作爲代價他自己也必須拿出10美分--換句話說，這麼做乙自己蒙受了損失。
The crucial point of the game is that in all three cases the second player suffers the same absolute loss if the first chooses to take money from him. The offence, in other words, is identical. But in the first version of the game he remains ahead if he does not retaliate (50 cents v 30 cents), in the second he comes out equal (50 cents v 50 cents), and in the third he ends up behind (50 cents v 90 cents).
這個遊戲最關鍵的一點在於，無論甲的起始財產是多少，只要甲選擇拿走乙的錢，乙都要蒙受完完全全的損失。也就是說，不論哪種情況，乙所受到的侵犯總是一樣的。但在第一種情況中（即當甲的起始財產是10美分），如果乙不採取反擊，他還能保持領先（50美分比30美分），第二種情況下（甲的起始財產爲30美分）甲乙平局（50美分比50美分），而第三種情況（甲的起始財產爲70美分）中，乙則會以落後告敗（50美分比90美分）。
The upshot was that in the first two cases about 15% of second players chose to retaliate if they had money taken. This was more or less the same as the number in all three versions of the game who "retaliated" even though they did not have money taken (a course of action allowed by the rules). In the third version, though, more than 40% of second players retaliated when money was taken from them-even though the outcome was still that the first player ended up ahead, with 60 cents to the second player's 40 cents.
遊戲的結果顯示，在前兩種情況中，只要錢被拿走，15%扮演乙的志願者會選擇反擊。而綜合三種情況來看，乙在錢沒有被拿走的前提下依然選擇向對方進行反擊的現象也大概佔15%。但在第三種情況中，一旦錢被拿走，超過40%扮演乙的志願者會採取反擊--即便甲仍然會以60美分比40美分的優勢取得遊戲的勝利。
On the face of things, this result suggests that what really gets people's goat is not so much having money taken, but having it taken in a way that makes the taker better off than the victim. That will clearly bear further investigation, for example by looking at the case where the first player begins the game better off than the second. It is intriguing, though, that even such trivial sums of money can provoke thoughts of revenge. In light of this, the fate awaiting those astronomically paid bankers could be a particularly nasty one.
乍一看，這樣的結果意味着真正讓人感到憤恨的不是自己的錢被拿走，而是拿走錢的人在拿走錢後財產比受害者多。顯然這個結論需要更多的調查加以證明，比如假如從一開始甲的錢就比乙多，結果會如何。有意思的是，就是這麼不起眼的幾十美分也能激發人的報復心理。從這一點看來，等待着那些拿着超高薪待遇的銀行家們的命運頗爲險惡。
