对扶手说再见

 

　　Good afternoon, this is your captain speaking. We are at cruising altitude and will be in flight for another three hours, so you’d better get comfortable.

 

　　That means figuring out who gets the arm rest — you, or your neighbor in the next seat. Oh, I know the seats are built so that one arm rest is shared by two passengers. Sure, we could have given all the seats their own arm rests, but then airplane flights would be so much less interesting from a social psychology point of view. And hey — you don’t really mind, do you?

 

　　Turns out you do. In a study conducted by three social psychologists, 426 pairs of people were observed on some twenty flights to see if there is a pattern to who gets the disputed armrest. The subjects observed were always one male seated next to one female. Guess who got the armrest most of the time?

 

　　Yep, the men. Twice as often? Three times? Try five times as often. Men dominated the social space that didn’t clearly belong to either person. Adjusting the experiment to only include people of equal size, that number dropped. But the men still took the arm rest three times as often as the women.

 

　　In post-flight interviews, 68 percent of the men said they were bothered when the other person took the armrest, while only 42 percent of the women felt annoyed. Men under forty reported the strongest irritation.

 

　　So…are all men just pushy cads? Well, one can debate what these data show. But this much is clear: that little strip of plastic is a mini-battleground.

 

　　下午好，我是这架飞机的机长。我们已经到达了巡航高度并且将继续飞3个小时，所以，请各位乘客确保舒适。

 

　　这意味着要确定出谁得到扶手—你，还是你邻座的人。我知道座位的设置使得两名乘客公用一个扶手。当然了，我们本可以是所有的乘客都有他们自己的扶手，但是这样一来，从社会心理学的观点看来，这段飞行的乐趣就将大打折扣。所以，其实你们并不介意，对吗？

 

　　结果证明你们还是很在意的。3名社会心理学家曾做过一个研究，他们观察了20次飞行中的426对乘客，希望能看出谁得到这个让人亦喜亦忧的扶手问题上是否有特定的模式。实验观察基本上是基于一名男性和一名女性邻座的情况下。猜一下谁得到扶手的时间最长呢？

 

　　是的，男人。概率是两倍？还是三倍？甚至达到了5倍。男人支配着不明确属于任何人的社会空间。把实验调整到参与人数体型相近的时候，这个数字下降了。但是占据扶手的男人的数量任然是女人的三倍。

 

　　在飞行之后的采访中，68%的男人称当其他人占据扶手的时候他们会感到烦恼，只有42%的女人会有同样的感受。对于40岁以下的男人这种刺激反应最为强烈。