时差N小时:对扶手说再见 Farewell to Arms

Good afternoon, this is your captain speaking.

下午好，我是这架飞机的机长。

We are atcruising altitude and will be in flight foranother three hours, so you'd better get comfortable.

我们已经到达了巡航高度并且将继续飞3个小时，所以，请各位乘客确保舒适。

That means figuring out who gets the arm rest-you,or your neighbor in the next seat.

这意味着要确定出谁得到扶手—你，还是你邻座的人。

Oh, I know the seats are built so that one arm rest isshared by two passengers.

我知道座位的设置使得两名乘客公用一个扶手。

Sure, we could havegiven all the seats their own arm rests, but then airplane flights would beso much less interesting from a social psychology point of view.

当然了，我们本可以是所有的乘客都有他们自己的扶手，但是这样一来，从社会心理学的观点看来，这段飞行的乐趣就将大打折扣。

And hey-you don't really mind, do you?

所以，其实你们并不介意，对吗?

Turns out you do.

结果证明你们还是很在意的。

In a study conducted by three social psychologists, 426 pairs of people wereobserved on sometwenty flights to see if there is a pattern to who gets the disputed armrest.

3名社会心理学家曾做过一个研究，他们观察了20次飞行中的426对乘客，希望能看出谁得到这个让人亦喜亦忧的扶手问题上是否有特定的模式。

The subjects observed were always one male seated next to one female.

实验观察基本上是基于一名男性和一名女性邻座的情况下。

Guess who got the armrestmost of the time?

猜一下谁得到扶手的时间最长呢?

Men dominated the socialspace that didn't clearly belong to either person.

男人支配着不明确属于任何人的社会空间。

Adjusting the experiment to only include peopleof equal size, that number dropped.

把实验调整到参与人数体型相近的时候，这个数字下降了。

But the men still took the arm rest three times as often as the women.

但是占据扶手的男人的数量任然是女人的三倍。

In post-flight interviews, 68 percent of the men said they were bothered when the otherpersontook the armrest, while only 42 percent of the women felt annoyed.

在飞行之后的采访中，68%的男人称当其他人占据扶手的时候他们会感到烦恼，只有42%的女人会有同样的感受。

Men under forty reported thestrongest irritation.

对于40岁以下的男人这种刺激反应最为强烈。

So…are all men just pushy cads?

所以，所有的男人都这么有好胜心吗?

Well, one can debate what these data show. But this much isclear: that little strip of plastic isa mini-battleground.

当然，你可以对这些数据提出异议。但是这多少能表明，对这个小小的塑料制品的争夺也是一个小小的战场。