爱说谎的人创造力较高

译者 看开一点

For Creative People, Cheating Comes More Easily

 对有创造力的人来说，作弊很容易

by Alix Spiegel

Alix Spiegel创作

December 5, 2011

于2011年12月5日

Five months after the implosion of Enron, Feb. 12, 2002, the company's chief executive, Ken Lay, finally stood in front of Congress and the world, and placed his hand on a Bible.

2002年2月12日，在安然公司破产五个月后，公司的首席执行官Ken Lay 终于站到国会和世人的面前，把手放到圣经上忏悔。

At that point everyone had questions for Lay. It was clear by then that Enron was the product of a spectacular ethical failure, that there had been massive cheating and lying. The real question was: How many people had been dishonest? Who was in on it?

在那一刻，人们要问Lay。很明显那时安然公司就是最大的道德沦陷的产物,安然公司一直都有大量的欺骗和隐瞒行为。真正的问题是：有多少人作弊了？谁参与了这件事？

Everyone wanted to know, and Lay, after his swearing in, said he badly wanted to explain things. There was just one problem: His lawyer insisted that he plead the Fifth.

大家都想知道Lay在发誓后说他非常想把事情解释，问题是：他的律师坚持说他拒不解释。

And so the public got no answers that day. Lay placed his hand on the Bible, solemnly swore to tell the truth, then invoked the Fifth Amendment and went home.

 所以那天公众就无法知道缘由，Lay把手放到圣经上，庄严地宣誓要说出实情，然后引用宪法第五条拒绝发言。

Still, the puzzle Lay left behind — How did Enron happen? — has served a useful purpose.

那么，Lay还是留给公众很多迷惑：安然事件是怎样发生的？这个不解起了重要的作用。

In most cases, we basically want to behave dishonestly, but we also want to view ourselves as good, honorable people. So we try to steal as much as we can without hurting our own image in our own eyes.

在许多时候，我们都本能地想要做不诚实的事情，但是我们想要别人把我们自己当成好人，诚实的人。因此我们试图在不损害自己的形象的同时尽可能地去表现自己。

- Dan Ariely, psychogist, Duke University

Dan Ariety 杜克大学的心理学家

In the wake of Enron, psychologists all over the country started looking more closely at how unethical behavior works. Last week, one product of those inquiries was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Dan Ariely of Duke University and Francesca Gino of Harvard published a study that looked at the link between creativity and dishonesty.

安然事件之后，整个美国的心理学家开始更加自信地研究不道德的行为是怎样起作用的，上周这些调查结果刊登在《人格与社会心理学》杂志上，杜克大学的Dan Ariely教授和哈佛大学的Francesca Gino教授公布了他们的研究，该研究指出了创造力和作假之间的联系。

'Cheating A Little Bit'

做一点点假

Watching the Enron story unfold in late 2001 and early 2002, Ariely says he found himself skeptical, but probably for different reasons than the rest of the country. He found it difficult to believe that Enron could be explained by a handful of bad apples like Lay, former Enron President Jeffrey Skilling and Chief Financial Officer Andrew Fastow. His gut sense was that the problem was likely more general.

当看着安然事件于2001下半年至2002上半年浮出水面的时候，Ariely说他发现自己开始怀疑，但是可能是由于别的原因而不是其他国家的原因。他发现相信安然事件能够被几个坏家伙解释清楚是很困难的，这些家伙有Lay，安然公司前董事长Jeffrey Skilling和财务总监Andrew Fastow。他凭直觉意识到问题可能更加普遍。

And so Ariely did a series of dishonesty studies in his lab and quickly discovered that the behavior was more widespread than he had anticipated. In the lab, when he gave people the opportunity to cheat, many took him up on it.

而且Ariely在他的实验室里又做了一系列的研究不诚实行为的实验，很快发现人的行为比实际预期传播的要广泛，在实验当中，他给大家一个作弊的机会，许多人都充分利用了这次机会。

"More than half the people are cheating in our experiments," he says. But the cheating Ariely found wasn't uniform: While a small number of those people were big cheaters, most only cheated a little bit.

“实验中超过一半的人都在作弊。”他说。但是他发现他们的作弊不是完全一致的，有一小部分人是大骗子，而大多数人只是撒了一个小谎。

"We find that very, very few of them cheat a lot," Ariely says. "About 50 percent are cheating a little bit."

我发现极少数的人会撒谎很厉害，他说：“50%的人只是欺骗一点点。”

So what was restraining their cheating? Why didn't they cheat more?

那么什么在抑制住他们作弊呢？为什么不多作弊呢？

According to Ariely, when we face an ethical dilemma, like what to report on our tax forms, for example, all of us are juggling two extremely powerful competing impulses.

根据Ariely的观点，当我们面对道德困境时，列如就像我们填写纳税申报表一样，我们一直徘徊在两个强大相悖的力量之间。

It's all about telling stories, so creative people are likely to be able to tell themselves better stories, which would allow them to cheat more on the one hand, but not feel worse about it on the other.

这就像讲故事一样，有创造力的人更能讲出好故事，同时他们一面让自己多多编造故事情节，另一方面对此一点不感到内疚。

- Dan Ariely, psychologist, Duke University

Dan Ariely杜克大学心理学家

"In most cases, we basically want to behave dishonestly, but we also want to view ourselves as good, honorable people," Ariely says. "So we try to steal as much as we can, while not hurting our own image in our own eyes."

在许多时候，我们本质上都想表现不诚实，但是我们也想把自己当成好人，有地位的人。Dan Ariely说：“那么当我们不想损坏我们自己的形象时，只好尽量掩饰自己。”

Creative People Cheated More

有创造力的人爱作假

That brings us to the study published last week. Ariely and collaborator Gino wondered if certain personality types were more prone to dishonesty than others. They decided to look at creative personalities, figuring that creative people might be better at rationalizing their dishonest actions.

上周我们就公布了研究结果，Ariely 和他的合作者 Gino 怀疑是否某种性格类型的人比他人更易于作弊，他们决定研究创造力的人的性格，他们发现有创造力的人更会为自己的作弊行为找借口。

"It's all about telling stories," Ariely explains, "so creative people are likely to be able to tell themselves better stories, which would allow them to cheat more on the one hand, but not feel worse about it on the other."

这与编故事有关，Ariely 解释说，“有创造力的人更能讲出好故事，同时他们一面让自己多多编造故事情节，另一方面对此一点不感到内疚。”

To test this theory, Gino and Ariely conducted five experiments, which they review in their paper. In one, after measuring the creativity of about 100 people, they asked those people to take a test.

为了检测这个理论，Gino 和Ariely 做了五个实验，在论文里他们阐述了这些实验过程，在一个实验里测定了100个人的创造力之后，他们让这些人参加了一个测验。

"We [gave] people a multiple-choice test. We [said], 'Please answer this as best you can, and we will pay you for each question.' "

我们给他们的是多项选择题测验。我们说：“请尽力回答这些测试问题，我们会给你报酬。”

Then after the questions were answered, Gino and Ariely gave the participants a bubble sheet like the kind used in the SATs, told them to transfer their answers there, then explained that because of a copying error, the bubble sheets already had the correct answers marked.

接着，在答题完毕之后，Gino and Ariely 给每个人一张像SAT考试那样的答题卡，并让他们把自己的答案从试卷转移到答题卡上，然后解释说由于印刷错误，答题卡上已经标出了正确答案。

"Now you have a dilemma," Ariely points out. "Do you answer correctly? Do you transfer B to B? Or do you cheat, change your answer, and write C, [and say] 'Oh yes, I knew it was C all along?' "

现在你就为难了，Ariely说明：“你回答的正确吗？你把'B'填成'B'了吗？你作弊改答案为'C'了吗?我本来就知道答案是“c”

The results of this experiment were clear.

实验结果非常清楚。

"Basically, the people who were more creative cheated to a higher degree," Ariely says.

“基本上，有创造力的人作弊的程度较高，”Ariely说。

Creating Credible Rationalizations

造成信任合理化

In all five of Gino and Ariely's experiments, creativity was clearly correlated with increased dishonesty. And though they are not yet fully able to demonstrate it, both Gino and Ariely feel like creativity increased dishonesty precisely because it allowed people to genuinely see credible rationalizations where others could not.

在Gino 和Ariely的这五个实验里，创造力的增加明显与作假能力成正比。目前，他们虽然还不能完全证明这一点，Gino 和Ariely觉得创造力恰恰可以助长作弊能力，因为创造力使人真正把谎言看成可信且合理的，而其他人却不能。

"If you are a creative person, all of a sudden you can go through the same amount of evidence and find many more links to justify the position that you want to have to start with."

如果你是一个富有创造力的人，突然你可以过一遍同样多的论据，会发现

But psychologist David Dunning of Cornell cautions this study might overemphasize the role of creativity in dishonesty. He points out that psychology has struggled for years to determine whether honesty is a function of a person's character or a function of the situations that people find themselves in.

但是心理学家康奈尔大学的David Dunning警告说，此项研究可能过分强调创造力在作弊行为中的作用。诚实是由人的性格决定的还是由他们自己所处的环境决定的呢？心理学已经为此争论了很多年。

And while he says that both are important, we often underestimate how much a situation influences what we do.

当他说两者都是重要的，我们经常低估了环境对我们行为的影响。

"In some situations, we're moral; in other situations, we're not so moral. And really, what it is is the situation pulling out this ability in all of us to either be ethical or to be unethical."

有些时候，我们是品行端正的；在另一些时候，我们不是那么正直，事实上，真正的原因是环境，它把我们的这种创造力引向道德或不道德的方向。