双语新闻：金钱游戏显露我们罗宾汉情结

金钱游戏显露我们内心深处的罗宾汉情结

　　Money game reveals our inner Robin Hood

　　金钱游戏显露我们内心深处的罗宾汉情结

　　(2006-2007学年第33期)

　　By Roxanne Khamsi 刘颖 译

　　{1}Oinnate desire for equality prompts us to “even out” the wealth of the rich among the poor — even at our own expense, a new study suggests.

　　{2}In the laboratory games, the poorest players surrendered some of their own money tokens simply to penalise their richer counterparts, without any hope of personal gain.

　　{3}James Fowler at the University of California in San Diego, US, and colleagues recruited 120 student volunteers to take part in the experiment. Each student sat before a computer terminal and played a game with various anonymous participants.

　　{4}At the start of each round, the computer told them they had received a certain number of tokens, either 12, 16, 24 or 36. Along with indicating how much money they had, the computer screen also displayed the amounts held by three other players.

　　{5}Fowler defined the “rich” players as those assigned the most money in a given group, and “poor” players as those with the least.

　　Welcome largesse

　　{6}The students had to indicate what they wanted to do with their tokens. Each token that subjects kept would contribute $0.05 towards the money they kept at the end of the game. So a subject who kept 20 tokens in a round would net $1. They could also use their tokens to reduce or increase the other three players’ sums.

　　{7}The subjects completed five rounds of the game, each time interacting online with three new anonymous players.

　　{8}About 30% of the time, the richest players generously gave up tokens to help boost the accounts of the poor players. And 12% of the time they used tokens to make the poorer players even more destitute.

　　Vanishing cash

　　{9}By contrast, in 44% of the rounds the poorest players gave up some of their tiny funds to see the rich become less wealthy. But even though these players acted somewhat like the legendary English bandit, Robin Hood, by taking from the rich, the money did not get redistributed to the poor. It simply disappeared.

　　{10}Previous experiments of this kind have not matched subjects with new, anonymous players in each round. And in these earlier studies, people often used their money to punish the richest and most miserly players. But Fowler’s group eliminated the element of revenge by masking participants’ identity, making it impossible for them to develop a reputation.

　　{11}Fowler says this means his participants acted purely to promote economic equality — not to exact revenge. He believes the overall findings indicate that people have “an inherent taste for equality”.

　　Dangerous inequality?

　　{12}“Behavioural findings such as these extend our knowledge about what motivates our economic and political decisions,” says economist Chetan Dave at the University of Texas in Dallas, US.

　　{13}“One of the reasons we cooperate may be because we care about equality,” says Fowler.

　　{14}“Inequality is dangerous. It encourages friction and strife” within a group, says economist Robert Frank of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, US. He adds that our ability to partially avoid such conflict could have given us an evolutionary edge. Although, he admits that the real world is rife with inequality.

　　参考译文：

　　{1}一项新的研究表明，人们内心对于平等的渴望促使人们将富人的财产“均分”给穷人，即使这样做会使自己付出代价。

　　{2}在一些实验游戏中，仅仅为了惩罚富有的对手，最穷的玩家放弃了自己的一部分代币，而他们自己却没有任何获得个人收益的可能。

　　{3}美国圣地亚哥市加利福尼亚大学的詹姆士•福勒及其同事招募了120名学生志愿者参加了这项实验。每名学生都坐在一台电脑终端机前，和不同的匿名参与者玩一场游戏。

　　{4}每轮游戏开始时，电脑告诉他们，他们获得了一定数额的代币，可能是12枚、16枚、24枚或是36枚。电脑向玩家显示他们自己拥有多少代币的同时，还会显示其他三位玩家持有的代币数额。

　　{5}福勒把一个小组内分得代币最多的玩家称为“富”玩家，把分得代币最少的称为“穷”玩家。

　　受人欢迎的慷慨大方

　　{6}学生们必须表明他们想用代币做什么。游戏结束时，实验对象每持有一枚代币，他们拥有的金钱就会增加0.05美元。因此如果一名实验对象在一轮游戏结束时持有20枚代币，那么他将会净赚一美元。他们也可以利用自己的代币减少或增加其他三位玩家的金钱数量。

　　{7}这些实验对象做完了五轮游戏，每轮游戏都是与三位不同的匿名玩家在线进行。

　　{8}在约30%的时间里，最富有的玩家慷慨地放弃了自己的代币以帮助穷玩家增加金钱数量，而在12%的时间里，他们利用代币令穷困的玩家更加穷困。

　　消失的金钱

　　{9}与之相反，在44%的时间里，最穷的玩家放弃了自己微薄资金的一部分，以减少富玩家的财产。然而，即使这些穷玩家洗劫富人，行为有点儿像传说中的英国强盗罗宾汉，洗劫而来的金钱却并没有重新分配给穷人，而是消失不见了。

　　{10}在此前进行的此类实验中，不是每轮游戏都给受试者分配不同的匿名玩家。在这些早期实验中，人们常常利用自己的金钱惩罚最富有、最吝啬的玩家。而福勒分配的小组隐瞒了参与者的身份，使他们不可能形成什么名声，从而消除了报复因素。

　　{11}福勒说，这也就意味着他的参与者们完全是为了促进经济平等，而不是为了实施报复。他认为，整体的实验结果表明，人们“在内心都喜欢平等”。

　　不平等是危险的？

　　{12}美国达拉斯市得克萨斯大学的经济学家切坦•戴夫说：“此类行为实验增进了我们对于人们的经济决定及政治决定的动因的了解。”

　　{13}福勒说：“人们相互合作的原因之一可能就是人们关心平等问题。”

　　{14}在一个群体内部，“不平等是危险的，不平等会造成摩擦冲突，”美国纽约州伊萨卡市康奈尔大学的经济学家罗伯特•弗兰克说。他补充说，我们能够部分地避免发生此类冲突，这使得我们在进化方面占了优势。尽管如此，他也承认现实世界里不平等的现象随处可见。