Passage Twenty Social psychology 社会心理学 【1】Why common sense is not actually very common.In 1776 Thomas Paine, a traitorous Englishman living in the American colonies, published a seditious 47-page pamphlet. Called “Common Sense”, it became a best-seller. It argued that the colonies should seek independence from British rule. Later that year they did exactly that. 为何常识实际上并不“平常”，1776年，一本47页的煽动性小册子出版了。作者是一位名为托马斯·潘恩的英国人，居住在北美洲英国殖民地，但却背叛了英国。这本小册子叫作《常识》，并成为了畅销书。书中称英国殖民地应当谋求独立，此后不久，北美英属殖民地真的独立了。 【2】Appeals to common sense are a staple of politics, especially when an insurgent wishes to distinguish(differentiate) himself from a supposedly aloof(unconcerned) and out-of-touch elite. 呼吁民众要具备常识是政治上的重要内容，尤其是当一位谋反者希望将自己同那些据称是麻木不仁、脱离人间疾苦的精英阶层区分开来的时候。 【3】But in a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Mark Whiting and Duncan Watts, a pair of computational social scientists at the University of Pennsylvania, note that the idea has seldom(rarely) been rigorously(carefully) studied. 但由宾夕法尼亚大学两名计算社会科学家马克·怀廷和邓肯·瓦茨发表在《美国国家科学院院刊》的一篇论文里，作者认为这一观点此前很少有细致的研究。 【4】The two researchers set out to fix that. They started by noting(noticing) that the standard concept of common sense has a somewhat circular definition: common sense is a set of claims that sensible(wise) people agree with, and sensible people are those who possess(have) common sense. 两位学者打算着手解决这一问题。他们首先注意到常识的标准概念就有点循环定义的味道，常识由明智人士认同的一系列观点构成，而明智人士则是那些具备常识之人。 【5】To get around such philosophical tangles, the researchers turned to Mechanical Turk, a website run by Amazon, a big tech firm, that allows people to post odd jobs. 为了解决这一哲学难题，研究人员使用大型科技公司亚马逊研发运营的Mechanical Turk网站，人们在该网站招聘、应聘 兼职工作。 【6】They recruited 2,046 human participants and asked them to rate 50 statements from a corpus of 4,407 claims that might plausibly be seen as commonsensical. 研究者招募了2046位实验参与者，让他们从由4407个说法组成的语料库中评出50个最有可能被视为是常识的讲法。 【7】As common sense might have predicted(forecast), the researchers found that plainly(clearly) worded claims concerning facts about the real world were the most likely to be rated as demonstrating common sense (“triangles have three sides”, for example, which is true by definition, or “avoid close contact with people who are ill”). 正如靠常识能预测的那样，研究者发现，简单明了、关乎事实与现实世界的说法最有可能被认为是常识（例如，“三角形有三条边”在定义上便是正确的，亦或是“避免与患病之人接 触”）。 【8】The more abstract the claims, the less likely participants were to agree that they were common sense (“all human beings are created equal”; “perception is the only source of knowledge”). 一个说法越抽象，实验参与者认定其为常识的可能就越小（“人生而平等”、“感知是知识的唯一来源”）。 【9】When they split the claims by subject, the researchers found that those concerning technology and science were the most likely to be rated as commonsensical, while matters of history and philosophy were the least likely. 当研究者依据主题将说法分门别类时，他们发现与科学技术相关的说法最有可能被认为是常识，而历史和哲学门类的说法被认为是常识的可能性则最低。 【10】A respondent’s age, sex, income and personal politics had little effect on what they thought counted as common sense, although psychological measures of social perceptiveness and the ability to reflect on one’s opinions(viewpoints) did. 受访者的年龄、性别、收入以及个人政治倾向对认定某一说法是常识与否的影响较小，尽管社会感知力的心理尺度以及反思自己观点的能力确有影响。 【11】Having investigated individual opinions, the researchers looked at how common sense works across big groups. Here, they found much less agreement than might have been expected. Only around 44% of claims in the corpus were rated as commonsensical by at least 75% of respondents. 调查了实验参与者的个人观点后，研究者进而研究了常识在大群体中起到的作用。在这方面，他们发现大群体中展现出的共识比预期的要少很多。语料库中只有约44%的说法被至少75%的受访者认定为常识。 【12】A stricter definition of common sense, in which everyone has to agree with a claim for it to count, cut that number to just 6.6%. Where exactly a sensible cut-off lies is a matter for debate. But truly “common” sense, it seems, is an elusive thing. 在研究者对常识给出一个更为严格的定义（每个人都要同意某种说法才能算数）后，上述占比降至仅6.6%。何为合理的界限尚且存在争议。但确实，常识似乎是一个难以捉摸的东西。 | 
