【导语】人们在做单个决定的时候，往往会受到日常生活中所接触的片面信息的干扰，导致不能客观地做出判断。（该文为2013考研英语完型填空的原文）
Psychology心理学
A question ofjudgment判断上的一个问题
Interviewersfavour those seen first面试者先入为主
Jun 16th 2012| from the print edition
A NEVER-ENDINGflow of information is the lot of most professionals. Whether it comes in theform of lawyers’ cases, doctors’ patients or even journalists’ stories, thisinformation naturally gets broken up into pieces that can be tackled one at atime during the course of a given day. In theory, a decision made when handlingone of these pieces should not have much, if any, impact on similar butunrelated subsequent decisions. Yet Uri Simonsohn of the University of Pennsylvania andFrancesca Gino at Harvard report in Psychological Science that this is not howthings work out in practice.
对于许多专业人士来讲，命里不缺的就是信息，信息泛滥且源源不断。律师之于案子，医生之于病人，甚至记者之于故事，四面八方而来的信息，零零散散，在一定时间内，这些信息自然而然地一个一个地被处理掉。理论上讲，即便这些问题在性质上是差不多的，可是彼此不相关联的话，对一个问题所做出的判断，跟对下一个问题所做出的判断，应该是彼此不受影响的。可是宾夕法尼亚大学尤里·西蒙逊和哈佛大学的法兰西丝卡·吉诺在《心理科学》杂志上的报告表示，这一观点跟我们的实际生活可不一致。
Dr Simonsohnand Dr Gino knew from studies done in other laboratories that people are, onthe whole, poor at considering background information when making individualdecisions. At first glance this might seem like a strength that grants theability to make judgments which are unbiased by external factors. But in aworld of quotas and limits—in other words, the world in which most professionalpeople operate—the two researchers suspected that it was actually a weakness.They speculated that an inability to consider the big picture was leadingdecision-makers to be biased by the daily samples of information they wereworking with. For example, they theorised that a judge fearful of appearing toosoft on crime might be more likely to send someone to prison if he had alreadysentenced five or six other defendants only to probation on that day.
博士西蒙逊和博士吉诺从其他实验室的研究中了解到，从总体上看，人们在做单个决定的时候是不怎么考虑背景信息的。乍一看，这貌似是一优点，判断不受外界因素的影响。但是这个世界是配额性和限制性的，换句话说，这个世界是由大部分的专业人士所主导的。两位研究人员怀疑，这实际上是一种弊端。他们推断，如果没有这个能力掌握大局，就会导致决策者不能客观地做出判断，反而被日常生活中所接触的片面信息所影响。举个例子，两位研究员这样理论，一位害怕对罪犯心慈手软的法官，如果那天他已经连续判了五六个缓刑，那么接下来的那一个很有可能会被判入狱。
To test thisidea, they turned their attention to the university-admissions process.Admissions officers interview hundreds of applicants every year, at a rate of4? a day, and can offer entry to about 40% of them. In theory, the success ofan applicant should not depend on the few others chosen randomly for interviewduring the same day, but Dr Simonsohn and Dr Gino suspected the truth wasotherwise.
为了验证这一想法，他们把目光瞄准大学招生程序。招生负责人每年要面试数百人，每天的比例在4?，录用的人也就占40%。理论上讲，申请人是否能成功，这跟同一天随机抽取的其他面试者是没有关系的，但是博士西蒙逊和博士吉诺怀疑，实际上可能不是这么回事。
They studiedthe results of 9,323 MBA interviews conducted by 31 admissions officers. Theinterviewers had rated applicants on a scale of one to five. This scale tooknumerous factors, including communication skills, personal drive, team-workingability and personal accomplishments, into consideration. The scores from thisrating were then used in conjunction with an applicant’s score on the GraduateManagement Admission Test, or GMAT, a standardised exam which is marked out of800 points, to make a decision on whether to accept him or her.
他们研究了由31位招生负责人主导的9323场MBA面试结果。面试过程是这样安排的，面试官对被面试者的评分是1-5分。评分结果来自各种因素的考虑，包括交流技巧，个人动机，团队合作能力，以及个人成就。根据这些因素产生的分数，加上申请人GMAT考试的成绩，决定他/她是否被录用。GMAT也就是管理研究生入学考试的意思，这是一种满分为800的标准考试。
Dr Simonsohnand Dr Gino discovered that their hunch was right. If the score of the previouscandidate in a daily series of interviewees was 0.75 points or more higher thanthat of the one before that, then the score for the next applicant would dropby an average of 0.075 points. This might sound small, but to undo the effectsof such a decrease a candidate would need 30 more GMAT points than wouldotherwise have been necessary.
博士西蒙逊和博士吉诺发现他们的直觉是对的。一如往常，每天面试一批，如果说这个被面试者的分数比前一个的分数高那么个0.75个点或是更多的话，下一个应征者的分数平均要降个0.075。听起来这个分值可能很小，但是想要弥补这个很小的分值，应征者的GMAT分数就要再多考30分。
As for whypeople behave this way, Dr Simonsohn proposes that after accepting a number ofstrong candidates, interviewers might form the illogical expectation that aweaker candidate “is due”. Alternatively, he suggests that interviewers may beengaging in mental accounting that simplifies the task of maintaining a givenlong-term acceptance rate, by trying to apply this rate to each daily group ofcandidates. Regardless of the reason, if this sort of thinking proves to have asimilar effect on the judgments of those in other fields, such as law andmedicine, it could be responsible for far worse things than the rejection ofqualified business-school candidates.
为什么会这样呢？博士西蒙逊认为，已经接受了一批实力强劲的应征者，面试官潜意识里期望下一个是个菜鸟，当然这种想法毫无逻辑可言。他建议面试官或许可以这么来算这笔心理账，维持一个长期的接受率，太烦，我们不如简化它，把长期的接受率划分给每一天的那批应征者。我们不管产生这种心理的原因是什么，如果这种心理同样适用于像法律、医学这样的领域，这事可就闹大了，可不像拒绝合格的商学院应征者于门外这么简单，这可是要负责任的。
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