Passage 3 How People Make Up Good Reasons for Bad Behaviour
借口与动机 《经济学人》

[00:00]You are deciding between two magazines to read.
[00:05] The one you choose just happens to feature photos of women
[00:11]in very small swimsuits. But you do not, you claim,
[00:16]pick that particular magazine for the bathing beauties;
[00:20]it happens to have more interesting articles,
[00:24]or better coverage of copper mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
[00:30]You will say this even in the midst of a lab experiment
[00:35]that has been set up so that the only possible difference
[00:38]between the two magazines is the presence (or absence) of swimsuits.
[00:45]Such was the finding of Zo
[00:48]Chance and Michael Norton both at Harvard Business School.
[00:53]The pair were making a study on how people justify "questionable" behaviour
[00:59]to themselves after the fact.
[01:03]They asked 23 male students to choose between two sports magazines,
[01:10]one with broader coverage and one with more feature articles.
[01:15]The magazine which also happened to contain a special swimsuit issue
[01:20]was picked three-quarters of the time, regardless of the other content.
[01:26]But asked why they chose that particular magazine,
[01:31]the subjects pointed to either the sports coverage
[01:34]or the greater number of features-whichever happened to accompany the bikinis.
[01:41]This may not seem surprising:
[01:44]the joke about reading Playboy for the articles is so old Ms Chance
[01:51]and Mr Norton borrowed it for the title of their working paper.
[01:56]But it is the latest in a series of experiments exploring
[02:02]how people behave in ways they think might be frowned upon,
[02:07]and then explain how their motives are actually squeaky clean.
[02:13]In another experiment, people chose to watch a movie in a room
[02:19]already occupied by a person in a wheelchair when an adjoining room
[02:25]was showing the same film,
[02:27]but decamped when the movie in the next room was different.
[02:33]Further compounding the problem, Ms Chance and Mr Norton's subjects,
[02:39]like the subjects of the similar experiments,
[02:42]showed little sign of being aware
[02:45]that they were merely using a socially acceptable explanation
[02:50]to look at women in swimsuits. Mr Norton reports that
[02:56]when he informs participants that they were acting for different reasons
[03:01]than they claimed, they often react with disbelief.
[03:07]Such research suggests how hard it is for companies to get bias
[03:13]out of hiring decisions. Indeed, even if you inform people ahead of time
[03:21]that they will be held accountable for potential bias,
[03:26]they react not by becoming more fair-minded,
[03:29]but by looking even more closely for potential acceptable explanations.
[03:36]Anti-discrimination laws may thus be leading, in some cases,
[03:41]not to more diverse workplaces but to more convincing explanations of bias
[03:48]on the part of managers.
[03:51]If accountability enhances, rather than reduces, bias,
[03:57]what is the alternative? The authors suggest presenting to a rigid set of
[04:04]criteria before seeing any of the possibilities, and sticking to it. Do this,
[04:11]Ms Chance suggests, and managers might be more likely to notice
[04:16]when they are changing emphasis on a socially acceptable criterion
[04:21]or if a less acceptable one is involved .