2015年经济学人 心理学 时间不等于金钱（在线收听）

Psychology

心理学

Time is not money

时间不等于金钱

Thinking about it makes you a better person, not a worse one

时间观念只会提升人格，绝无裨益

“THE love of money”, St Paul memorably wrote to his protege Timothy, “is the root of all evil.” “All” may be putting it a bit strongly, but dozens of psychological studies have indeed shown that people primed to think about money before an experiment are more likely to lie, cheat and steal during the course of that experiment.

圣保尔曾在给其亲信蒂莫西的信中写到“金钱是万恶之源”。或许，“万恶”一词说的过于严重，但无数心理研究表明实验前被灌输金钱观念的人更容易在实验过程中撒谎、作弊并行窃。

Another well-known aphorism, ascribed to Benjamin Franklin, is “time is money”. If true, that suggests a syllogism: that the love of time is a root of evil, too. But a paper just published in Psychological Science by Francesca Gino of Harvard and Cassie Mogilner of the University of Pennsylvania suggests precisely the opposite.

另一名言—“时间就是金钱”，出自本杰.富兰克林。如果他说的有理，那么就可以推断出：对时间的珍爱也是万恶之源。然而，哈佛商学院的弗兰切斯卡· 吉诺(Francesca Gino)和宾夕法尼亚大学的凯希·莫吉内尔(Cassie Mogilner)教授共同撰写发表在《心理科学》的论文则持有完全相反的结论。

Dr Gino and Dr Mogilner asked a group of volunteers to do a series of what appeared to be aptitude tests. As is often the case in such experiments, though, what the volunteers were told, and what the truth was, were rather different things.

他俩召集了一些志愿者，参加一系列类似性向测试的实验活动。和其它这类实验一样，这些志愿者被告知的与事实往往是不同的。

In the first test they were asked to make, within three minutes, as many coherent sentences as they could out of a set of words they had been presented with. What they were not told was that each of them had been assigned to one of three groups. Some volunteers' word sets were seeded with ones associated with money, such as “dollars”, “financing” and “spend”. Some were seeded with words associated with time (eg, “clock”, “hours”, “moment”). And some were seeded with neither. Thus unknowingly primed, the volunteers were ready for the second test.

第一轮测验要求他们用所给词汇在限定的三分钟内尽可能造出更多连贯的句子。但他们并不知道，所有参与者已被悄悄分为三组。第一组所给词汇主要是金钱类的，如“美元”、“融资”、“消费”等。第二组则与时间相关，如“钟表”、“小时”、“一刻”等。第三组则为中性词汇，完全不同于前两组。就这样毫无知觉地，志愿者们进入了下一轮测试。

This was mathematical. They were given a sheet of paper with 20 matrices which each contained 12 numbers, two of which added up to ten (for example, 3.81 and 6.19). They had to write down, on a separate answer sheet, how many of these pairs they could manage to find in five minutes. They were also given a packet of money and told they could reward themselves with a dollar for each pair they discovered.

第二场是数字游戏。每人持有一张印有20个数阵的试卷，每个数阵含12个数字，两两相加为10（如3.81和6.19）。要求每人5分钟内在答题纸上写下所能找到的所有相加为10的配对。同时，每人得到一袋硬币，且被告知，若找到一对即可奖励自己一美元。

Crucially, they were not asked to show their workings on the answer sheets—and the matrix sheets, on which those workings might have appeared, carried no identifier and were ostentatiously discarded once the test was done. Nevertheless, by hiding an identification code in a sample matrix on the answer sheet, Dr Gino and Dr Mogilner knew which matrix sheet each candidate had been given and thus who had cheated and who had not. They found that 88% of those who had been primed with money-related words in the first test cheated, as did 67% of those given neutral words. Of those primed with time-related words, though, only 42% cheated.

关键是，本次测验并未要求考生上交答卷或在试卷上写下姓名等身份信息，尽管试卷上可能会有他们的做题思路，但测试一结束就被狠狠地抛弃了。不过，吉诺教授和莫吉内尔教授其实事先已在答题卷上秘密标好对应试卷的身份代码，因此哪些人作弊、哪些人没作弊，他们是一清二楚的。结果表明，第一次实验中接触金钱相关词汇的志愿者有88%的人作弊，接触中性词汇的志愿者有67%的人作弊，而接触时间相关词汇的只有42%作弊。

Nor, despite St Paul's aphorism, was the lure of lucre during the experiment (as opposed to the effect of thinking about it as a result of being primed) necessary as a corrupting influence. A similar trial on different participants showed that presenting the matrix as a test of intelligence also caused those primed with the idea of money to cheat more than those primed with the idea of time—though, intriguingly, that did not apply if the matrix was presented as a test of personality.

尽管圣保尔的格言并非毫无道理，但并不一定证明就是试验中的利益诱惑才如此广泛地腐蚀了人们纯洁的心灵（该观点反对将实验结果归于事先所灌输的观念）。因为在另一相似的实验中（参与者不同），参与者被告知自己是在做智力测验，最后发现也是同样的结果，即那些有着金钱观念的比时间观念的更易作弊——有趣得是，如果只是视为人格测验，结果却完全不同。

This led Dr Gino and Dr Mogilner to suspect that self-reflection played a part in controlling unethical behaviour during the test. They therefore conducted a third test in which, for half the volunteers, there was a mirror in the cubicle they were sitting in when doing the experiment.

针对以上测试结果，吉诺教授和莫吉内尔教授怀疑测试中的非道德行为是受自我反省控制的。为此，他们又设计了第三场试验，其中半数人在测验过程中眼前是搁有镜子的。

Volunteers primed to think about money cheated 39% of the time when a mirror was present but 67% when it was not. Those primed to think about time cheated 32% of the time in the presence of the mirror and 36% in its absence—results that are statistically indistinguishable.

被灌输金钱思想的一组，当现场设有镜子时，参与者在39%的测试过程中出现作弊行为，而没有镜子时，则为67%。相同条件下，被灌输时间观念的一组，分别为32%和36%，该组前后结果基本没什么变化。

Finally, a fourth experiment asked primed volunteers to fill in a questionnaire before tackling the matrix. In among “filler” questions intended to disguise what was happening this asked them to rate how they felt about self-reflective statements like, “Right now, I am thinking about who I am as a person.”

最后第四场实验要求每位已有不同思想输入的参与者在解决数阵前先完成一份问卷。问卷上设有掩饰之前不光彩行为的“补充性”问题，调查他们在看到自我反思表述语句时的想法与感受，如“此时此刻，我在思考着作为人，自己究竟是谁。”。

As in the previous tests, those primed with money words cheated more often than those primed with neutral words and far more often than those primed with time words. But whether someone cheated was also related to how strongly he felt about the self-reflective statements presented to him in the questionnaire.

之前的实验结果显示，被输入金钱类词汇的参与者作弊倾向最高，被输入中心词汇的其次，而被输入时间类词汇的作弊倾向为最小。但是，最后一次实验证明，参与者是否作弊也受其在看到问卷上自我反思陈述时的内心感受所影响。

It seems, then, that thinking about time has the opposite effect on people from thinking about money. It makes them more honest than normal, rather than less so. Moreover, the more reflective they are, the more honest they become. There must be an aphorism in that.

由此，我们似乎可以得出这样一个结论，时间观念与金钱观念对人们所产生的影响是截然不同的。时间观念带给个人诚信的只会是正能量，绝非负能量。而且，一个人越懂得反躬自省，那么他就越诚实。我想，对此必定也有那么一句格言的吧。