問題詳情

Questions 43-45   In Principles of Psychology, one of the founding works of experimental psychology, WilliamJames talked a lot about “instincts.” This term was used to roughly refer to specialized neural circuitsthat are common to every member of a species and are the product of that species’ evolutionary history.Taken together, such circuits constitute (in our own species) what one can think of as “human nature.”   It was and is common to think that other animals are ruled by “instinct,” whereas humans lost theirinstincts and are ruled by “reason,” and that this is why we are so much more flexibly intelligent thanother animals. James, however, argued that human behavior is more flexibly intelligent than that ofother animals because we have more instincts, not fewer. We tend to be blind to the existence of theseinstincts, however, precisely because they process information so effortlessly and automatically. Theystructure our thought so powerfully, he contended, that it can be difficult to imagine how things couldbe otherwise. As a result, we take “normal” behavior for granted. We do not realize that “normal”behavior needs to be explained at all. This “instinct blindness” makes the study of psychology difficult.To get past this problem, James suggested that we try to “make the natural seem strange” and that weshould not take “the natural” for granted.   In our view, William James was right about evolutionary psychology. Although the idea of“mak[ing] the natural seem strange” appears to be odd, it is a pivotal part of the research on naturalcompetences. Many psychologists avoid this line of thinking, arguing that nothing about “the natural”needs to be explained. As a result, social psychologists are disappointed unless they find a phenomenon“that would surprise their grandmothers,” and cognitive psychologists spend more time studying howwe solve problems we are bad at, like learning math or playing chess, than ones we are good at. Butour natural competences -- our abilities to see, to speak, to find someone beautiful, to reciprocate afavor, to fear disease, to fall in love, to initiate an attack, to experience moral outrage, to navigate alandscape, and myriad others -- are possible only because there is a vast and heterogeneous array ofcomplex computational machinery supporting and regulating these activities. This machinery works sowell that we do not even realize that it exists. We all suffer from instinct blindness. As a result,psychologists have neglected to study some of the most interesting machinery in the human mind
43. According to William James, humans tend to be more flexibly intelligent than most animals because
(A)they can naturally coordinate complex instincts well.
(B) they use their reason to override natural instincts.
(C) they are by nature better at computation and machines.
(D)they are born with higher intelligence quotient.
(E) they are much more emotionally mature.

參考答案

答案：A
難度：適中0.5
統計：A(0),B(0),C(0),D(0),E(0)

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