好友之間贈送聖誕卡過時了嗎
Is the Christmas card obsolete? I suppose the answer depends on what function you think the Christmas card is intended to serve, if any at all. Surely it is no longer intended to convey information. Email and social networks do a more efficient job, and including a Christmas newsletter or family photograph (I do both) will earn you only scorn from any self-respecting British snob.
Some believe that the Christmas card list, where we keep track of old favours and slights, is a sort of passive-aggressive vendetta. There is truth in this. Late in 1974, two sociologists, Phillip Kunz and Michael Woolcott, posted more than 500 Christmas cards to people they did not know. Some of them were “high status” cards, using expensive materials and signed “Dr and Mrs Phillip Kunz”. Others were from “Phillip and Joyce Kunz” or used cheaper stationery or both.
有人認爲，記錄着我們之前得到過的幫助和受過的怠慢的聖誕卡寄送名單，是一種消極的復仇。這話有些道理。1974年末，社會學家菲利普•孔茲(Phillip Kunz)和邁克爾•伍爾科特(Michael Woolcott)向陌生人寄出了500多張聖誕卡。其中一些是“高尚”卡片，紙質精良，署名爲“菲利普•孔茲博士夫婦”。其他一些卡片或是署名爲“菲利普和喬伊絲(Joyce)•孔茲”，或是紙質較差，抑或兩者皆是。The Kunz family received, along with a complaint from the police, some rather touching replies: “Dear Joyce and Phil, Received your Christmas card and was good to hear from you. I will have to do some explaining to you. Your last name did not register at first . . . Please forgive me for being so stupid for not knowing your last name. We are fine and hope you are well. We miss your father. They were such grand friends.”
“孔茲一家”除收到了一封來自警方的抗議信以外，還收到了一些相當感人的回覆：“親愛的喬伊斯和菲爾，我已經收到了你們的聖誕卡，收到你們的消息真是太好了。我必須向你們做些解釋。一開始我沒認出你們的姓……請原諒我如此愚蠢，不知道你們的姓。我們很好，希望你們也好。我們想念你的父親。他們真是很好的朋友。”
But what is most striking is that more than 100 strangers felt obliged to send a signed card in response. That is the power of reciprocity. (Response rates were particularly high if “Dr Kunz” had written on a fancy card to a working-class household. That is the power of status.)
但最驚人的是，有逾100個陌生人認爲有必要回寄一張手寫的卡片。這就是禮尚往來習俗的力量。（寄給工人階層家庭的署名“孔茲博士”的高檔卡片回覆率格外高。這就是社會地位的力量。）If this is what Christmas cards are all about — mindless reciprocal obligation coupled with some social climbing — then I think we can all agree on two things: we could do without them; and we’ll never be rid of them. Thomas Schelling, a winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics, once advocated a bankruptcy procedure — wiping clean the list of people to whom we “owe” a Christmas card. If only.
如果這就是聖誕卡的意義所在——機械的禮尚往來義務、加上一點攀高枝活動，那麼我認爲所有人應該都同意以下兩點：我們可以沒有聖誕卡；並且我們永遠不會擺脫聖誕卡。諾貝爾經濟學獎得主托馬斯•謝林(Thomas Schelling)曾經提議採取某種“破產”程序，把我們“欠”下的聖誕卡債清零。我們要是真能這樣做就好了，可惜……But perhaps the Christmas card also serves other purposes. Consider the exchange, “How do you do?”, “How do you do?” This is phatic communication. It conveys no detailed information but it acknowledges others and implies that there is nothing much to report. “I’m OK, and you’re OK, and lines of communication are open if that changes.”
但聖誕卡或許還承載了其他功能。想想這樣的交談，“你好嗎？”，“你好嗎？”。這是一種交際對話。這段對話沒有傳達任何具體信息，只是向別人打招呼，並暗示沒什麼值得一說的事情。“我很好，你也很好，如果出了什麼事，儘管告訴我。”A Facebook “poke” could achieve the same thing at much lower cost. But perhaps the expense and the hassle is part of the point. If someone invites you for dinner and you say “thank you” as you leave, you may still wish to follow up with a thank-you note to show that you have enough invested in the relationship to take the trouble. If relationships weren’t hard work, they would not be relationships.
Facebook的“戳一下”(poke)能夠以低得多的成本達到同樣的效果。但或許寄聖誕卡的部分意義恰恰在於它費錢費事。如果有人邀請你吃飯，你在離開時也說了“謝謝”，你可能還是希望在晚些時候再寫一份道謝便條，以示你對這份關係足夠重視，願意費這個事。不需要花費精力維護的人際關係就不是人際關係了。There’s a thing called the “social brain” hypothesis: it states that humans evolved large and energy-intensive brains not to do hard sums or design clever tools but because they needed them to navigate the complexities of dealing with other people. Back in 1992, Robin Dunbar — an anthropologist and psychologist now based at the University of Oxford — published a fascinating addendum to that idea. Dunbar had been looking at the social group size and the brain size of different primates, and found that primate species with larger neocortices had grooming relationships with larger social groups. Extrapolating to humans, he produced what has become known as Dunbar’s Number. If our brains are any guide, we’re built to handle a social network of about 150 people.
有一個所謂“社會大腦”假說認爲：人類進化出消耗大量能量的大體積大腦，不是爲了進行復雜的運算，也不是爲了設計巧妙的工具，而是因爲人需要大腦來應對複雜的人際交往。早在1992年，現任職於牛津大學(Oxford)的人類學家和心理學家羅賓•鄧巴(Robin Dunbar)就發表了一篇非常有趣的文章，對這一思想進行了補充。當時鄧巴對不同的靈長類動物的社羣規模和腦部大小進行了比對研究，發現新皮層更大的靈長類物種在更大的社羣內相互梳理毛髮。推及人類，他提出了所謂的“鄧巴數字”(Dunbar’s Number)。如果可以進行這樣的推斷的話，那麼以人類的大腦，每個人應該能應付大概150個人的社交網絡。Dunbar’s Number is both more uncertain and more complex than popular presentations would have you believe. Dunbar himself argues that social networks are nested, following rough powers of three: five people to whom we might turn for substantial emotional or financial support in a moment of true crisis; 15 intimate friends; 50 friends; 150 rather casual friends, and so on.
流行的解讀會讓你覺得鄧巴數字是一個確定而簡單的原則，但實際上它要更不確定、也更復雜一些。鄧巴本人認爲，社交網絡的構建大致遵循三倍原則：你在真正遇到麻煩時會向他們尋求實質性情感或者財務支持的密友有5個人；比較親密的朋友有15個人；關係較好的朋友有50個人；泛泛之交則有150個人，以此類推。Social networking tools let us reach more people, more quickly, and in some detail if we so choose. I can reach 90,000 followers on Twitter but — how can I put this tactfully? — they are not my friends. These new technologies are a great convenience but it is not clear that they are allowing us to expand the number of genuine friends that we have. A recent study by Bruno Gonçalves, Nicola Perra and Alessandro Vespignani examined 25 million conversations between Twitter users, and found that the network with whom people might actually have several reciprocal conversations was between 100 and 200 — Dunbar’s number again. As for close friends, women engage in two-way communication with around six people on Facebook; men with just four.
社交網絡工具讓我們能以更快的速度接觸到更多的人，如果我們願意，這些工具還能幫助我們進行比較詳細的接觸。我在Twitter上能接觸到9萬名粉絲，但是，我該怎麼委婉地說呢，他們不是我的朋友。這些新科技給我們提供了很大的便利，但並無明顯跡象顯示它們能讓我們得以擴展真朋友的數量。布魯諾•貢薩爾維斯(Bruno Gonçalves)、尼古拉•佩拉(Nicola Perra)和亞歷山德羅•韋斯皮尼亞尼(Alessandro Vespignani)最近進行了一項研究，他們查看了Twitter用戶間的2500萬次對話，發現人們可能進行幾次相互對話的社交網絡大概包含100到200人——這又印證了鄧巴數字。至於密友，女性在facebook上大概與6個人進行雙向交流；而男性僅與4個人保持這種關係。Much like primate grooming, a Christmas card requires effort, time and expense. An up-to-date Christmas list requires some thought about who matters to you, for reasons noble or ignoble. And a few years ago, two researchers carefully examined how big Christmas cards lists tended to be, once allowing for the fact that a single card could reach several members of a household. The researchers were Russell Hill and Robin Dunbar. And the number of people reached by a typical British Christmas card list? 154.
與靈長類相互理毛的舉動很像，聖誕卡需要花費精力、時間和金錢。要列一份最新的聖誕卡寄送名單，你需要思考一下誰對你來說很重要，不管是出於光明正大的理由，還是上不了檯面的理由。幾年前，兩名研究者仔細研究了聖誕卡寄送名單的一般長度，並考慮一張卡片可以同時接觸到同一個家庭中的好幾個人的事實。這兩名研究者分別是拉塞爾•希爾(Russel Hill)和羅賓•鄧巴。那麼在英國，一張聖誕卡片寄送名單通常能接觸到多少個人？答案是154個。
