問題詳情

Passage B“WOULD You Kill the Fat Man?” is the title of a recent book about a set of moral problems thatphilosophers like to ponder, and psychologists to put to their experimental subjects. In the canonical form,you are on a footbridge watching a trolley speeding down a track that will kill five unsuspecting people. Youcan push a fat man over the bridge onto the tracks to save the five. (You cannot stop the trolley by jumpingyourself, only the fat man is heavy enough.) Would you do it?Most people quail at the idea of shoving the man to his death. But alter the scenario a bit, and reactionschange. People are more likely to throw a switch that would divert the trolley on to another track where itwill kill only one person. The utilitarian calculation is identical—but the physical and emotional distancefrom the killing makes throwing the switch much more popular than throwing the man.There are other ways to nudge people‟s judgments, too. A rather counter-intuitive one was reported in apaper published last month in PLOS ONE, a journal. In it, Albert Costa of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra inSpain, and his colleagues, found that the language in which the dilemma is posed can alter how peopleanswer. Specifically, when people are asked the fat-man question in a foreign language, they are more likelyto kill him for the others‟ sake.Dr. Costa and his colleagues interviewed 317 people, all of whom spoke two languages—mostlyEnglish plus one of Spanish, Korean or French. Half of each group were randomly assigned the dilemma intheir native tongue. The other half answered the problem in their second language. When asked in theirnative language, only 20% of subjects said they would push the fat man. When asked in the foreign language,the proportion jumped to 33%.Morally speaking, this is a troubling result. The language in which a dilemma is posed should make nodifference to how it is answered. Linguists have wondered whether different languages encode differentassumptions about morality, which might explain the result. But the effect existed for every combination oflanguages that the researchers looked at, so culture does not seem to explain things. Other studies in“trolleyology” have found that East Asians are less likely to make the coldly utilitarian calculation, andindeed none of the Korean subjects said they would push the fat man when asked in Korean. But 7.5% wereprepared to when asked in English.The explanation seems to lie in the difference between being merely competent in a foreign languageand being fluent. The subjects in the experiment were not native bilinguals, but had, on average, begun thestudy of their foreign language at age 14. (The average participant was 21.) The participants typically ratedtheir ability with their acquired tongue at around 3.0 on a five-point scale. Their language skills were, inother words, pretty good—but not great.Several psychologists, including Daniel Kahneman, who was awarded the Nobel prize in economics in2002 for his work on how people make decisions, think that the mind uses two separate cognitivesystems—one for quick, intuitive decisions and another that makes slower, more reasoned choices. These canconflict, which is what the trolley dilemma is designed to provoke: normal people have a moral aversion tokilling (the intuitive system), but can nonetheless recognize that one death is, mathematically speaking,better than five (the reasoning system). 第 9 頁，共 10 頁This latest study fits with other research which suggests that speaking a foreign language boosts thesecond system—provided, that is, you don‟t speak it as well as a native. Earlier work, by some of the samescholars who performed this new study, found that people tend to fare better on tests of pure logic in aforeign language—and particularly on questions with an obvious-but-wrong answer and a correct answer thattakes time to work out.Regardless of the exact mental mechanism behind the team‟s findings, they could have big implications.Boaz Keysar, a psychologist at the University of Chicago and one of the study‟s authors, talks ofinvestigating the impact on medical or legal decision-making. Meanwhile, globalization is boosting thenumber of bilinguals. There are more non-native English speakers (500m, by one estimate) than native ones(perhaps 340m). Big firms are making English their internal language, even if it is not the native tongue ofmost of their workers. Meetings of international organizations like the United Nations or the European Unionare often conducted in languages that are not the preferred ones of most of those attending. Perhaps it isreassuring to think they may be more coolly rational than meetings of monoglots—unless, that is, you are themetaphorical fat man about to be pushed under a train.
36. What is the main idea of the passage?
(A) Learning a foreign language boosts a person‟s cognitive system for decision making.[!--empirenews.page--]
(B) People become more rational when moral dilemmas are posed in a foreign language.
(C) Bilinguals perform better than monoglots in areas that require logical reasoning.
(D) The mental mechanism that controls a person‟s decision making still remains unknown.

參考答案

答案：B
難度：適中0.578947
統計：A(10),B(33),C(5),D(7),E(0)

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