学术英语-U3-Section B课文电子版

EAP Unit3 PsychologyPersons: Judging a Book by its CoverSaul Kassin et al.1.Have you ever met someone for the first time and formed a quick impression based only on a quick “snapshot” of information? As children, we were told that we should not judge a book by its cover, that things are not always what they seem, that surface appearances are deceptive, and that all that glitters is not gold. Yet as adults we can’t seem to help ourselves.2.To illustrate the rapid-fire nature of the process, Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov (2006) showed college students photographs of unfamiliar faces for one-tenth of a second, half a second, or a full second. Whether the students judged the faces for how attractive, likable, competent, trustworthy, or aggressive they were, their ratings — even at the briefest exposure — were quick and were highly correlated with judgments that other observers made without time-exposure limits. Flip quickly through the pages of an illustrated magazine, and you may see for yourself that it takes a mere fraction of a second to form an impression of a stranger from his or her face.3.If first impressions are quick to form, then on what are they based? In 500 BC, the mathematician Pythagoras looked into the eyes of prospective students to determine if they were gifted. At about the same time, Hippocrates, the founder of modern medicine, used facial features to make diagnoses of life and death. In the nineteenth century, Viennese physician Franz Gall introduced a carnival-like science called phrenology and claimed that he could assess a person’s character by the shapeof their skulls. And in 1954, psychologist William Sheldon concluded from flawed studies of adult men that there is a strong link between physique and personality.4.People may not measure each other by bumps on the head, as phrenologists used to do, but our first impressions are influenced in subtle ways by a person’s height, weight, skin color, hair color, tattoos, piercings, eyeglasses, and other aspects of physical appearance. As social perceivers, we also form impressions of people that are often accurately based on a host of indirect telltale cues. In Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You, Sam Gosling (2008) describes research he has conducted showing that people’s pers onalities can be revealed in the knick-knacks found in their offices and dormitory rooms, the identity claims they make on Facebook pages, the books that line their shelves, and the types of music that inhabit their iPods. In one study, fictional character s with “old-generation” names such as Harry, Walter, Dorothy, and Edith were judged to be less popular and less intelligent than those with younger-generation names such as Kevin, Michael, Lisa, and Michelle. In another study, both men and women were seen as more feminine when they spoke in high-pitched voices than in lower pitched voices.5.The human face in particular attracts more than its share of attention. Since the time of ancient Greece,human beings have attended to physiognomy —the art of reading character from faces. Although we may not realize it, this tendency persiststoday. For example, Ran Hassin and Yaacov Trope (2000) found that people prejudge others in photographs as kind-hearted rather than mean-spirited based on such features as a full, round face, curly hair, long eyelashes, large eyes, a short nose, full lips, and an upturned mouth. Interestingly, these researchers also found that just as people read traits from faces, at times they read traits into faces based on prior information. In one study, for example, participants who were told that a man was kind —compared to those told he was mean —later judged his face to be fuller, rounder, and more attractive.6.In social perception studies of the human face, researchers have found that adults who have baby-faced features — large, round eyes; high eyebrows; round cheeks; a large forehead; smooth skin; and a rounded chin — tend to be seen as warm, kind, naive, weak, honest, and submissive. In contrast, adults who have mature features —small eyes, low brows and a small forehead, wrinkled skin, and an angular chin — are seen as stronger, more dominant, and more competent (Berry & Zebrowitz-McArthur, 1986). Thus, in small claims court, judges are more likely to favor baby-faced defendants who are accused of intentional wrongdoing but rule against them when accused of negligence. And in the work setting, baby-faced job applicants are more likely to be recommended for employment as day-care teachers, whereas mature-faced adults are considered to be better suited for work as bankers. Results like these have led Leslie Zebrowitz and Joann Montepare (2005) to conclude that baby-facedness profoundly affects human behavior in the blink of an eye.7.What accounts for these findings? And why, in general, are people so quick to judge others by appearances? To begin with, human beings are programmed by evolution to respond gently to babyish features so that real babies are treated with tender loving care. Many years ago, Nobel Prize-winning ethologist Konrad Lorenz noted that infantile features in many animal species seem to trigger a special nurturing response to cuteness. Recently, this old idea derived new support from a brain-imaging study showing that a frontal brain region associated with love and other positive emotions is activated when people are exposed, even fleetingly, to pictures of babies’ faces but not to pictures of the faces of other adults (Kringelbach et al., 2008).8.Our reflex-like response to babies is understandable. But do we really respond in the same way to baby-faced adults and, if so, why? Leslie Zebrowitz believes that we do-that we associate infantile features with helplessness traits and then overgeneralize this expectation to baby-faced adults. Consistent with this point, she and her colleagues found in a brain-imaging study that the region of the brain that was activated by pictures of babies’ faces was also activated by pictures of baby-faced men (Zebrowitz et al., 2009).9.Other researchers also believe that people as social perceivers have a tendency to overgeneralize in making snap judgments. Alexander Todorov and others (2008) find that people are quick to perceive unfamiliar faces as more or less trustworthy — an important judgment we must often make — and that we do so by focusing on features that resemble the expressions of happiness and anger (a trustworthy face has a U-shaped mouth and raised eyebrows; in an untrustworthy face, the mouth curls down and the eyebrows form a V shape). In other words, faces are seen as trustworthy ifthey look happy, an emotion that signals a person who is safe to approach, and untrustworthy if they look angry, an emotion that signals danger to be avoided. (1102 words)第三单元心理学Text B以貌取人索尔·卡辛等。