做了壞事兒就忘記的叫做不道德健忘症
‘Unethical Amnesia’ Explains Why People Conveniently Forget Their Awful Behavior
“不道德的健忘症”解釋了爲什麼人們很快地忘記他們可怕的行爲
It feels bad to be reminded of unsavory actions — accidentally insulting a colleague, forgetting your sibling’s birthday, acting a fool at your best friend’s wedding. So you conveniently forget about it.
想起那些讓人討厭的行爲的感覺很糟糕-不小心侮辱了同事，忘記自己兄弟姐妹的生日，又或者在朋友的婚禮上像個傻瓜一樣。所以你很快就忘記了這些。
According to a new study, there’s a name for that:unethical amnesia.
一項新的研究將這種行爲命名爲 “不道德的健忘症” 。
As author Maryam tells Science of Us, she and her co-author Francesca Gino wanted to examine why people repeatedly do bad things. What the organizational psychologists, of Northwestern University and Harvard Business School, respectively, found is that recalling unsavory actions causes “psychological discomfort,” so people have fuzzier memories of the bad things they’ve done. It has to do with the concept of self: Evidently, it’s natural to discard evidence that you’re not an ethically pure person.
作者瑪利亞姆告訴我們說，她和她的合著者法蘭西絲卡．吉諾想調查清楚爲什麼人們重複得做糟糕的事情。西北大學和哈佛商學院的工業組織心理學家分別發現回憶那些令人討厭的行爲會引起心理上的不適，因此人們對於他們所做的那些糟糕的事情的記憶比較模糊。這與自我觀念有關：顯而易見，拋棄那些證明你不是一個道德純粹的人的證據會很自然。
To ferret out this cognitive mechanism, the researchers did nine experiments with a total of 2,100 participants.
爲了確認這一認知機制，研究者們在2100個參與者中做了9個試驗。
In two of those experiments, participants were asked to write about ethical or unethical actions from their personal histories. Fitting the hypothesis, unsavory memories were less vivid than the positive ones. And, intriguingly enough, memories of others’ actions didn’t differ in clarity depending on whether they were good or bad.
在其中的兩個試驗中，參與者們要求根據自己的過去寫下一些道德或者不道德的行爲。符合預期的設想，對於不道德的行爲的記憶比道德行爲的記憶要模糊很多。而且更加有趣的是，關於其他事情，無論好壞，記憶的清晰度都沒太大差別。
In another study, participants completed a coin-toss task where they could lie to get more money. Two weeks later, the researchers measured their memory of playing the game and other episodes from that time, like eating dinner. Similarly, the people who cheated in the coin tossing had worse recall than the people who didn’t.
在另一個研究裏，參與試驗的人通過投擲硬幣來完成一個可以用說謊來賺錢的任務。兩週後，研究者測試了他們對此次任務的記憶以及期間的其他事情，比如說吃完飯之類的。同樣的，在投擲硬幣中撒了謊的人的記憶比那些沒撒謊的人的記憶差很多。
But it’s not just from direct experience. In another experiment, participants were asked to read a story about cheating or not cheating on an exam, from either a first-person or third-person perspective. Again, the participants who read the story about cheating from the first-person perspective had worse recall, and the third-person readers had no difference.
但是，這不是直接的經驗。在另外一個試驗中，參與者要求以第一人稱或者第三人稱的視角讀一篇關於考試作弊和未作弊的故事。再次，以第一人稱視角閱讀考試作弊的參與者的人的記憶很差，而以第三人稱閱讀的參與者的記憶則沒有太大的差別。
As an assistant professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg Business School, explains, the amnesia has a protective quality. We hold ourselves to be moral agents in the world, so evidence of wrongdoing creates all sorts of dissonance between our ideas about ourselves and our actual behavior. The unethical amnesia acts like an “adaptive defensive behavior,” helping our egos sidestep unpleasant truths.
西北大學凱洛格商學院的副教授解釋道，健忘症有一種保護的特質。在這個世界上，我們一直持道德標準自居，因此那些糟糕行爲的證據會在我們的思想和實際行爲之間產生不和諧。不道德的健忘症就像是自我適應的防衛行爲一樣，幫助自我避諱不愉快的真相。
