综合英语第五册第十课课文

Lesson Eleven
Befriending
Social psychologists are used to hearing that their experiments are a waste of time because they just prove the obvious, and tell us what we always knew. But there is a very simple and effective riposte to this accusation. The trouble with folk—wisdom(what we always knew) is that it tends to come in pairs of statements, both of which are ‘obviously’ true, but which—unfortunately—are mutually exclusive. For example, we all know that too many cooks spoil the broth. But wait a minute: don’t many hands make light work? Similarly with friendship: birds of a feather flock together, but what about the attraction of opposites? Experiments may not be as much fun as intuitions, but they sometimes tell us which proverbs are actually true, or (more often) in what circumstances which apply.
There is one other preconception to be removed before tackling the question of whom we like and love, whom we find attractive and make friends with. Why bother to study an area in which we are all expert practitioners? Surely we can all make friends and organise social relationships naturally, without any assistance from behavioural scientists? Well, if you beliveve that, have a word with a marriage guidance counsellor, a psychiatrist, or someone involved in industrial relations.
Research on friendship has established a number of faces, some interesting, some even useful. Did you know that the average student has 5-6 friends, or that a friend who was previously an enemy is liked more than one who has always been on the right side? Would you believe that physically attractive individuals are preferred as friends to those less comely, and is it fair that physically attractive defendants are less likely to be found guilty in court? Unfortunately, such titbits don’t tell us much more about the nature or the purpose of friendship.
Why do we make friends? Students of animal behaviour have pointed out that social attraction has an obvious adaptive function: it helps a species both to protect and to reproduce itself. Behaviourists have postulated an affiliation drive, similar to the more familiar drives of hunger, thirst or sex. But although affiliative behaviour shares some of the properties associated with biological drives, I doubt whether our desire to make friends is really much influenced by adaptive considerations. And if we want to talk in term of drives, it’s just as plausible to suggest that we require a certain amount of stimulation, balanced between the predictable and the unexpected, which friends can provide. On this analysis, affiliation would be encompassed by a more general curiosity of exploratory drive.
In fact, studies of friendship seem to implicate more complex factors. For example, one function friendship seems to fulfil is that it supports the image we have of ourselves, and confirms the value of the attitudes we hold. Certainly we appear to project ourselves onto our friends; several studies have shown that we judge them to be more like us than they (objectively) are. This suggests that we ought to choose friends who are similar to us (‘birds of a feather’) rather than those who would be complementary (‘opposites attract’), a prediction which is supported by empirical evidence, at least so far as attitudes and beliefs are concerned. In one experiment, some developing。