试题详情

Text 1"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.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 paperjust published in Psychological Science by Francesca Gino of Harvard and Cassie Mogilner of the University of Pennsylvania suggests precisely the opposite.Dr Gino and Dr Mogilner asked a group of volunteers to do a scries of what appeared to be aptitude tests.As is ofien the case in such experiments,though,what the voiunteers were told.and what the truth was,were rather different things.In the first test they were asked to make,within three minutes,as many coherent sentences as they could out of a set ofwords 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.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 ofmoney and told they could reward themselves with a dollar for each pair they discovered.This led Dr Gino and Dr Mogilner to suspect that self-reflection played a part in controlling uncthical 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.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.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,1 am thinking about who I am as a person."As in the previous tests,those primed with money words cheated more ofien than those primed with neutral words and far more ofien 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.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. What can we infer from the tests?