the advantages of closing a few doors
The Advantages of Closing a Few Doors
心理学发现:关掉一些门的好处（引自https://www.wendangku.net/doc/bb16342865.html,/item/667514846/）
By JOHN TIERNEY（引自
https://www.wendangku.net/doc/bb16342865.html,/2008/02/26/science/26tier.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1）
原文作者：JOHN TIERNEY
The next time you’re juggling options — which friend to see, which house to buy, which career to pursue — try asking yourself this question: What would Xiang Yu do?
下一次你犹豫不决的时候: 去见哪个朋友?卖哪个房子?从事什么职业? 试着问问自己这样一个问题:项羽是怎么做的?
Xiang Yu was a Chinese general in the third century B.C. who took his troops across the Yangtze River into enemy territory and performed an experiment in decision making. He crushed his troops’ cooking pots and burned their ships.
项羽是公元前三世纪中国的一个将军,他带领他的军队跨过长江直入敌军领地,如何做出决策,他做了
一次尝试.他砸坏了队伍里所有的锅,烧了所有的船(译者注:破釜沉舟-_-!).
He explained this was to focus them on moving forward — a motivational speech that was not appreciated by many of the soldiers watching their retreat option go up in flames. But General Xiang Yu would be vindicated, both on the battlefield and in the annals of social science research.
他解释这是为了让队伍集中精力在作战上——当时动员演讲并不奏效,在士兵中间弥漫的撤退的情绪越来越严重.项羽的做法,无论从战争角度或者从社会科学研究角度,做的都是正确的.
He is one of the role models in Dan Ariely’s new book, “Predictably Irrational,”an entertaining look at human foibles like the penchant for keeping too many options open. General Xiang Yu was a rare exception to the norm, a warrior who conquered by being unpredictably rational.
他成为Dan Ariely新书《可知的不合理（Predictably Irrational）》中的人物榜样.这本书以幽默的视角阐述了人类的一些小毛病，比如喜欢对一件事情保留很多选择的可能性，却不做出决定。项羽是一个非常与众不同的例外，一个被不可知的合理（译者注：unpredictably rational，此处对应前面的可知的不合理（Predictably Irrational）是说项羽最终的结果肯定是输掉战争，但是输掉的方法充满了巧合）的情况所打败的勇士。
Most people can’t make such a painful choice, not even the students at a bastion of rationality like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Dr. Ariely is a professor of behavioral economics. In a series of experiments, hundreds of students could not bear to let their options vanish, even though it was obviously a dumb strategy (and they weren’t even asked to burn anything).
许多人不能做出如此痛苦的决定，甚至在以理性而闻名的麻省理工学院（MIT，Massachusetts Institute of Technology）的学生，也不能免俗，Ariely博士是那里行为经济学（译者注：behavioral economics）的教授。一系列实验证明，参加实验的数百名学生都不能忍受实验中他们的策略落空，甚至包括其中的一些非常愚蠢的策略（而且，他们甚至没有被命令烧掉任何东西——相对于项羽的部队来说）。
The experiments involved a game that eliminated the excuses we usually have for refusing to let go. In the real world, we can always tell ourselves that it’s good to keep options open.
这个实验包括这样一个游戏是消除那些我们平时用来拒绝让其离开的借口。在现实世界中，我们经常
告诉自己，最好对某事持有很多种选择。
You don’t even know how a camera’s burst-mode flash works, but you persuade yourself to pay for the extra feature just in case. You no longer have anything in common with someone who keeps calling you, but you hate to just zap the relationship.
比如说，你甚至不知道一个照相机的闪存Burst（块读写）模式是怎么工作的，但是你说服自己，为这个额外的功能买单。你和某个人再也没有共同的话题，但是你就是不愿意彻底的断绝关系。
Your child is exhausted from after-school soccer, ballet and Chinese lessons, but you won’t let her drop the piano lessons. They could come in handy! And who knows? Maybe they will.
即使你孩子学校以外的足球，芭蕾和中文课程，把他们弄的精疲力尽，但是你也不会让她放弃她的小提琴课。学这些东西，迟早有用！但是天知道是不是真有的用。
In the M.I.T. experiments, the students should have known better. They played a computer game that paid real cash to look for money behind three doors on the screen. (You can play it yourself, without pay, at https://www.wendangku.net/doc/bb16342865.html,.) After they opened a door by clicking on it, each subsequent click earned a little money, with the sum varying each time.
麻省理工的实验中，学生们有更深刻的理解。实验要求他们玩一个电脑游戏，如果找到屏幕上门背后的钱以后，则会得到真实的金钱奖励。（你也可以在https://www.wendangku.net/doc/bb16342865.html, 这个页面上自己玩，不过得不到奖励。）他们点击鼠标，就可以打开一个门，每一次再点击就会挣到一点钱，每次出现的钱数不同。
As each player went through the 100 allotted clicks, he could switch rooms to search for higher payoffs, but each switch used up a click to open the new door. The best strategy was to quickly check out the three rooms and settle in the one with the highest rewards.
当每个游戏者点够100次，他们就可以到切换到另外的一个房间，看看有没有更高的奖励，但是每交换一次房间，就要耗费一次可以用来开门的点击。最好的策略是迅速的选出三个房间然后关注其中有最高奖励的那个。
Even after students got the hang of the game by practicing it, they were flummoxed when a new visual feature was introduced. If they stayed out of any room, its door would start shrinking and eventually disappear.
当学生们适应了一段时间的游戏之后，他们仍然面对屏幕上新的情况的时候，他们还是会发生困惑。如果他们处于任何房间之外，门就会逐渐缩小，然后消失。
They should have ignored those disappearing doors, but the students couldn’t. They wasted so many clicks rushing back to reopen doors that their earnings dropped 15 percent. Even when the penalties for switching grew stiffer — besides losing a click, the players had to pay a cash fee — the students kept losing money by frantically keeping all their doors open.
他们本来应该忽略这些消失的门，但是学生们仍然不舍得放弃。他们浪费了太多的点击，急切的再次打开这些门，这样导致了他们的收入减少了15%。甚至即使对过快的切换这些门的时候会有一些处罚（除了浪费一次点击以外，他们还需要另外支付费用），这些学生虽然不断的被罚钱，仍然疯狂的保持他们的门是开的。
Why were they so attached to those doors? The players, like the parents of that overscheduled piano student, would probably say they were just trying to keep future options open. But that’s not the real reason, according to Dr. Ariely and his collaborator in the experiments, Jiwoong Shin, an economist who is now at Yale.
为什么他们这么粘着这些门不放呢？游戏者，就像那些负担过重的孩子的家长，很可能说是为了试着保证孩子的未来有很多的选择。根据Ariely博士和他的同事Jiwoong Shin的实验研究，这其实不
是真实的原因。Jiwoong Shin现在是耶鲁大学的经济学者。
They plumbed the players’ motivations by introducing yet another twist. This time, even if a door vanished from the screen, players could make it reappear whenever they wanted. But even when they knew it would not cost anything to make the door reappear, they still kept frantically trying to prevent doors from vanishing.
他们通过改变游戏规则策略，深入分析了游戏者的动机。这一次，甚至当门从屏幕上小时，游戏者也可以让在任何时候让门恢复。但是即使这样，当他们知道让门再次出现，不会扣分，他们仍然疯狂的试图防止门消失。
Apparently they did not care so much about maintaining flexibility in the future. What really motivated them was the desire to avoid the immediate pain of watching a door close.
显然，他们不在乎保持未来的灵活性，他们真正的动机在于他们希望那个避免看着门关上时立即产生的痛苦。
“Closing a door on an option is experienced as a loss, and people are willing to pay a price to avoid the emotion of loss,” Dr. Ariely says. In the experiment, the price was easy to measure in lost cash. In life, the costs are less obvious —wasted time, missed opportunities. If you are afraid to drop any project at the office, you pay for it at home. “在选择上关上一扇门，就好像是一种失败，人们愿意支付一部分成本来避免心理上的失落感”，Ariely 博士说。在实验中，这种成本可以用损失的金钱来衡量。在现实生活中，这种成本就不是那么显而易见了——比如浪费时间，或者错过机会。如果你害怕丢失办公室里头的某个工程的机会，那你就必须从家庭生活中支付这个成本。
“We may work more hours at our jobs,” Dr. Ariely writes in his book, “without realizing that the childhood of our sons and daughters is slipping away. Sometimes these doors
close too slowly for us to see them vanishing.”
“我们经常加班超时，”Ariely博士在他的书中说，“没有意识到我们的儿女们的童年正悄悄的溜走了。有时候，这扇门关的太慢，我们都没有意识到它的消失。”
Dr. Ariely, one of the most prolific authors in his field, does not pretend that he is above this problem himself. When he was trying to decide between job offers from M.I.T. and Stanford, he recalls, within a week or two it was clear that he and his family would be more or less equally happy in either place. But he dragged out the process for months because he became so obsessed with weighing the options.
Ariely博士，是在他领域内多多产的作家之一，但从不掩饰自己在这个问题上，他自己也不能处理的很好。他回忆：当他试图决定是到麻省理工工作还是到斯坦福工作的时候，那一两个礼拜，他和他的家人都差不多一样的乐意去其中任何一个地方。但是他整整拖了一个月，因为他也在权衡两者之间犯迷糊了。
“I’m just as workaholic and prone to errors as anyone else,” he says.. “I have way too many projects, and it would probably be better for me and the academic community if I focused my efforts. But every time I have an idea or someone offers me a chance to collaborate, I hate to give it up.”
“我工作十分专注而且我比别人更追求完美”他说，“我有和很多工程要做，而且我倾注我全部努力在其上的话，很可能对我和学术委员会都更好。但是每次我有其他的主意或者其他人给我合作机会的话，我却很讨厌放弃这样的机会。”
So what can be done? One answer, Dr. Ariely said, is to develop more social checks on overbooking. He points to marriage as an example: “In marriage, we create a situation where we promise ourselves not to keep options open. We close doors and announce to others we’ve closed doors.”
好，那应该做什么呢？答案只有一个，Ariely博士说，对于可能性有很多的事情需要做更多的社会范畴的约束检查（译者注：就是说，自己再给自己留后路太多的情况下，让别人和社会来监督自己）。他用婚姻举了一个例子：“对于婚姻，我们保持了一种态度：我们对自己承诺，不要给自己太多的其他选择机会，我们就关上了这扇门而且我们给其他人宣布我们已经关门了。”
Or we can just try to do it on our own. Since conducting the door experiments, Dr. Ariely says, he has made a conscious effort to cancel projects and give away his ideas to colleagues. He urges the rest of us to resign from committees, prune holiday card lists, rethink hobbies and remember the lessons of door closers like Xiang Yu.
或者，我们可以自己试着这样做一下。就像那个关门的实验一样，Ariely博士说，他已经很理性的取消一些工程，或者他对同事说放弃一些其他的新的想法。他还劝他的同事们从过多的委员会中辞职，重新安排自己的假期，拾起自己的爱好，并且记得项羽上的那堂关掉门的课。
If the general’s tactics seem too crude, Dr. Ariely recommends another role model, Rhett Butler, for his supreme moment of unpredictable rationality at the end of his marriage. Scarlett, like the rest of us, can’t bear the pain of giving up an option, but Rhett recognizes the marriage’s futility and closes the door with astonishing elan. Frankly, he doesn’t give a damn.
如果一般的方法都太过原始的话，Ariely博士推荐了另外的一个人物榜样——瑞特（译者注：Rhett Butler，小说《飘》中的男主人翁）在他婚姻的最后，不可知未来的但又肯定要发生的关键时刻，斯嘉丽（译者注：Scarlett，小说《飘》中的女主人翁），就像我们其他人一样，不能忍受做出一个放弃的选择，但是瑞特认识到他婚姻的局限，于是用令人吃惊的冲动关上了门，坦白的说，他做的不错。