高三英语阅读培优训练：8

高三英语阅读培优训练

洁净与道德：当身体的洁净变成道德的纯净

【原文】

ⅠWhen people are asked to list their favorite metaphor, they typically cite great works of poetry, literature or speech. Indeed, many metaphors are born from creative insight. But there is more to metaphor than this. Some metaphors are not literary creations at all—instead they seem to be built from the ground up, given to us by experience. Metaphors of this sort—linking the abstract to the concrete, perceptual, and instinctive—were studied systematically by the UC-Berkley cognitive linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson, at Brown University.

ⅡWhat they and others realized is that our concepts are fundamentally shaped by the fact that our minds reside in fleshy, physical bodies. As a result, even our most abstract concepts often have an “embodied” structure. In a classic example, people seem to understand moral virtue as if it were similar to physical cleanliness. To be virtuous is to be physically clean and free from the impurity that is sin. As the University of Pennsylvania psychologist and disgust expert Paul Rozin has shown, experiencing morality in terms of the embodied dimension of infection can lead to some striking behaviors, such as the refusal to wear a sweater belonging to an evil person because it seems somehow contaminated by the evil essence of that person.

ⅢIt's clear that people talk about morality in purity terms—whether explicitly expressing concerns about contamination b y evil or asserting that one's “conscience is clean”—but do they also experience morality that way? Could it be that the embodied structure of morality operates covertly to guide moral judgment and behavior?

ⅣSimone Schnall, psychologist at the University of Plymouth, and her colleagues have demonstrated just how this can happen. Having shown in previous studies that inducing disgust or a sense of dirtiness can make people's moral judgments more severe, they set out to explore the opposite. Might physical cleanliness encourage less severe moral judgments? To test this idea, they had participants read brief vignettes describing morally questionable behaviors, such as falsifying information on a resume. Prior to reading and responding to these vignettes, “cleanliness” was induced either through the activation of purity-related concepts or through the direct experience of hand-washing.

ⅤThey found that the experience of “cleanliness”—either through the subtle priming of concepts about cleanliness or by actual cleaning—reduced people's tendencies to see the behaviors described in the vignettes as morally wrong. Apparently, participants' sense of physical purity influenced their evaluations of the actions of others. When they themselves were clean and pure, so were others.