雅思阅读 104: The Blinders We Wear (我们佩戴的心理眼罩)

改编自 The Conversation / Ray Nickerson, Tufts University。雅思阅读 Section 3 难度，约 1050 词。 素材来源：https://theconversation.com/confirmation-bias-a-psychological-phenomenon-that-helps-explain-why-pundits-got-it-wrong-68781

Reading Passage

A. When post-mortems after a dramatic election began to appear, commentators reached for a familiar culprit: the confirmation bias. The charge was that pollsters and pundits had seen only what they expected, or wanted, to see, and so missed the result that everyone else lived through. Psychologists describe confirmation bias as the tendency to notice, seek out, or credit information that fits what one already believes, while avoiding, explaining away, or forgetting whatever cuts against it. It is among the best-documented quirks of human reasoning, and also among the most consequential, because it operates quietly across every domain of thought — from how a scientist reads a study, to how a juror weighs evidence, to how a person interprets a late-night text. Far from being a failing of the dim or the partisan alone, it is now regarded as a near-universal habit of mind, one that the brightest and best-educated fall into as readily as anyone else. Understanding how it works, and the different forms it takes, has become essential to understanding why people so often talk past one another, and why two reasonable people can draw opposite lessons from the very same set of facts.

B. The bias wears at least two guises, and psychologists find it useful to tell them apart. The first is impersonal. Consider a classic laboratory puzzle. Four cards lie on a table, showing respectively A, B, 1 and 2. The task is to decide which cards must be turned over to test the rule: "if a card has A on one side, it has 1 on the other." The correct choice is the A card and the 2 card, because a non-1 value on the reverse of the 2 card would falsify the rule. Yet most people flip either the A card alone, or A together with the 1. Few see the point of the 2. The common thread is that people hunt for evidence that would prove the rule true and rarely bother to look for evidence that would prove it false. This urge to seek confirmation even when nothing is personally at stake is the impersonal, or "unmotivated," face of the bias.

C. The second guise is far more loaded. Here the reasoner is not neutral but wants a particular conclusion to hold, and so collects material that supports it while discarding what does not. Researchers call this "case building," and it is on open display whenever an attorney argues in court or a debater addresses an audience. Neither side volunteers evidence that would damage its own case; both present only the material that raises the probability of the outcome they seek. Crucially, this is perfectly proper there. The rules of engagement are understood, and no one expects a barrister to hand the jury ammunition for the defence. The trouble begins when the same case-building instinct escapes the courtroom and the debating hall, and masquerades instead as impartial analysis. The partisans of television and radio, for instance, interpret the very same event in diametrically opposite ways — and yet almost all of them insist, sincerely, that they are offering a balanced view. It is, the author observes, almost possible to predict what a given commentator will say about a news story before the story has broken, so reliably does position determine interpretation.

D. The motivated bias also shapes where people choose to look. It expresses itself as selectivity: selectivity in the sources one consults, and selectivity in how one processes what they contain. Listening only to radio stations or watching only channels whose opinions match one's own is a small daily enactment of it. So is mixing only with like-minded company, or asking for criticism from people carefully pre-selected to offer praise. When the stakes are high and emotions run hot, such selective feeding becomes almost automatic. In the heated atmosphere that preceded the election, arguments from opposing camps barely moved anyone; each side encountered the other's case as a distorted echo rather than as a challenge. That the experts predicted one outcome so confidently suggests that they, too, were reading the data as they had come to expect — a Clinton win — rather than as it actually were. Social media, in this reading, did not create the bias but merely supercharged it: it offered a ready-made echo chamber in which like-minded voices reinforced one another and dissenting views were only ever encountered through hostile summaries. The result was not a disagreement settled by argument but two sets of observers who, having seen the same events, walked away with irreconcilable accounts of what had happened.

E. None of this, the author cautions, is the property of a single tribe. The bias is thought to operate independently of age, gender, education, political persuasion, or general intelligence; it does not spare the clever or the well-read. The surest sign of its hold, in fact, is the confident conviction that one is somehow immune to it. Recognising the bias is not, however, the same as curing it. The laboratory tasks that reveal it still trip up clever subjects, and the media ecosystem that rewards selective attention shows few signs of reform. What the decades of research do offer is a defensive habit: the deliberate practice of asking what evidence would overturn one's view, rather than merely what would support it, and of seeking out the adversary's strongest argument before resting a case on one's own. It is a habit that courts and debates have institutionalised for centuries; the challenge is to import it into ordinary reasoning, where it is neither expected nor rewarded. Doing so, the research implies, may be the single most useful defence a person can build against the blinders that everyone else is wearing too.

Questions 1-4

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B, C, D and E from the list of headings below.

List of Headings i. The two faces of the bias — and a famous card puzzle ii. Why pollsters predicted the wrong election winner iii. When case-building is legitimate — and when it hides as fairness iv. Selective attention in the real world v. The bias spares no one — and a habit that might help vi. How lawyers are trained at university vii. A history of political campaigning

1. Paragraph B: ____
2. Paragraph C: ____
3. Paragraph D: ____
4. Paragraph E: ____

Questions 5-8

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

5. In the card puzzle, why do most people fail to choose the "2" card? A. They believe it is irrelevant to the rule. B. They look only for evidence that would confirm the rule. C. They cannot see the number on its other side. D. They think the rule is already false.

6. Why does the writer say case-building is "perfectly proper" in court? A. Because lawyers are always honest. B. Because the rules of engagement are understood and expected there. C. Because juries are easily persuaded. D. Because evidence is never relevant in trials.

7. What distinguishes the "motivated" form of the bias? A. It occurs only in laboratory experiments. B. The reasoner wants a particular conclusion and gathers evidence to support it. C. It affects only unintelligent people. D. It can be switched off at will.

8. What defensive habit does the writer recommend at the end? A. Avoiding all controversial topics. B. Asking what evidence would overturn one's view and seeking the adversary's strongest argument. C. Trusting only expert commentators. D. Never changing one's mind under pressure.

Questions 9-13

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer?

Write:

• TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
• FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
• NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

9. In the card puzzle, the correct cards to turn over are A and 2.
10. Confirmation bias affects less educated people more than well-read ones.
11. Partisan television commentators usually admit openly that they are biased.
12. The author believes that being aware of the bias automatically removes it.
13. Ray Nickerson has served as an advisor to electoral polling firms.

Questions 14-15

Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

In courtrooms and debates, the practice of presenting only supporting evidence is called (14) __________ building, and is accepted because the rules of engagement are understood. The danger arises when this practice masquerades as impartial (15) __________.

答案与解析

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