‘Unethical Amnesia’ Explains Why People Conveniently Forget Their Awful Behavior
“不道德的健忘癥”解釋了為什么人們很快地忘記他們可怕的行為

It feels bad to be reminded of unsavory actions — accidentally insulting a colleague, forgetting your sibling’s birthday, acting a fool at your best friend’s wedding. So you conveniently forget about it.
想起那些讓人討厭的行為的感覺(jué)很糟糕-不小心侮辱了同事，忘記自己兄弟姐妹的生日，又或者在朋友的婚禮上像個(gè)傻瓜一樣。所以你很快就忘記了這些。

According to a new?study, there’s a name for that:unethical?amnesia.
一項(xiàng)新的研究將這種行為命名為 “不道德的健忘癥” 。

As author Maryam tells Science of Us, she and her co-author Francesca Gino wanted to examine why people repeatedly do bad things. What the organizational psychologists, of Northwestern University and Harvard Business School, respectively, found is that recalling unsavory actions causes “psychological discomfort,” so people have fuzzier memories of the bad things they’ve done. It has to do with the concept of self: Evidently, it’s natural to discard evidence that you’re not an ethically pure?person.
作者瑪利亞姆告訴我們說(shuō)，她和她的合著者法蘭西絲卡．吉諾想調(diào)查清楚為什么人們重復(fù)得做糟糕的事情。西北大學(xué)和哈佛商學(xué)院的工業(yè)組織心理學(xué)家分別發(fā)現(xiàn)回憶那些令人討厭的行為會(huì)引起心理上的不適，因此人們對(duì)于他們所做的那些糟糕的事情的記憶比較模糊。這與自我觀念有關(guān)：顯而易見(jiàn)，拋棄那些證明你不是一個(gè)道德純粹的人的證據(jù)會(huì)很自然。

To ferret out this cognitive mechanism, the researchers did nine experiments with a total of 2,100?participants.
為了確認(rèn)這一認(rèn)知機(jī)制，研究者們?cè)?100個(gè)參與者中做了9個(gè)試驗(yàn)。

In two of those experiments, participants were asked to write about ethical or unethical actions from their personal histories. Fitting the hypothesis, unsavory memories were less vivid than the positive ones. And, intriguingly enough, memories of others’ actions didn’t differ in clarity depending on whether they were good or?bad.
在其中的兩個(gè)試驗(yàn)中，參與者們要求根據(jù)自己的過(guò)去寫(xiě)下一些道德或者不道德的行為。符合預(yù)期的設(shè)想，對(duì)于不道德的行為的記憶比道德行為的記憶要模糊很多。而且更加有趣的是，關(guān)于其他事情，無(wú)論好壞，記憶的清晰度都沒(méi)太大差別。

In another study, participants completed a coin-toss task where they could lie to get more money. Two weeks later, the researchers measured their memory of playing the game and other episodes from that time, like eating dinner. Similarly, the people who cheated in the coin tossing had worse recall than the people who didn’t.
在另一個(gè)研究里，參與試驗(yàn)的人通過(guò)投擲硬幣來(lái)完成一個(gè)可以用說(shuō)謊來(lái)賺錢(qián)的任務(wù)。兩周后，研究者測(cè)試了他們對(duì)此次任務(wù)的記憶以及期間的其他事情，比如說(shuō)吃完飯之類(lèi)的。同樣的，在投擲硬幣中撒了謊的人的記憶比那些沒(méi)撒謊的人的記憶差很多。

But it’s not just from direct experience. In another experiment, participants were asked to read a story about cheating or not cheating on an exam, from either a first-person or third-person perspective. Again, the participants who read the story about cheating from the first-person perspective had worse recall, and the third-person readers had no?difference.
但是，這不是直接的經(jīng)驗(yàn)。在另外一個(gè)試驗(yàn)中，參與者要求以第一人稱(chēng)或者第三人稱(chēng)的視角讀一篇關(guān)于考試作弊和未作弊的故事。再次，以第一人稱(chēng)視角閱讀考試作弊的參與者的人的記憶很差，而以第三人稱(chēng)閱讀的參與者的記憶則沒(méi)有太大的差別。

As an assistant professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg Business School, explains, the amnesia has a protective quality. We hold ourselves to be moral agents in the world, so evidence of wrongdoing creates all sorts of dissonance between our ideas about ourselves and our actual behavior. The unethical amnesia acts like an “adaptive defensive behavior,” helping our egos sidestep unpleasant truths.
西北大學(xué)凱洛格商學(xué)院的副教授解釋道，健忘癥有一種保護(hù)的特質(zhì)。在這個(gè)世界上，我們一直持道德標(biāo)準(zhǔn)自居，因此那些糟糕行為的證據(jù)會(huì)在我們的思想和實(shí)際行為之間產(chǎn)生不和諧。不道德的健忘癥就像是自我適應(yīng)的防衛(wèi)行為一樣，幫助自我避諱不愉快的真相。

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