Passage 2
Honesty may be the bestpolicy, but lying has its merits—even when we are deceiving ourselves. Numerous studies have shownthat those who are practiced in the art of self-deception might be moresuccessful in the spheres of sport and business. They might even be happierthan people who are always true to themselves. But is there ever a downsideto believing our own lies?
A study by Zoe Chance of YaleUniversity tested the idea, by watching what happens when people cheat ontests.
Chance and her colleagues ranexperiments which involved asking students to answer IQ and general knowledgequestions. Half the participants were given a copy of the test paper which had—apparently "inerror"—been printed with the answers listed at thebottom. This meant they had to resist the temptation to check or improve theiranswers against the real answers as they went along.
As you'd expect, some of theseparticipants couldn't help but cheat. Collectively,the group that had access tothe answers performed better on the tests than participants who didn't—even though both groupsof participants were selected at random from students at the same university,so were, on average of similar ability. We can't know for sure who was cheating—probably some of the people who had answers would have got highscores even without the answers—but it means that theaverage performance in the group was partly down to individual smarts, andpartly down to having the answers at hand.
The crucial question forChance's research was this: did people in the "cheater"group knowthat they'd been relying on the answers Or did they attribute their success inthe tests solely to their own intelligence?
The way the researchers testedthis was to ask the students to predict how well they'd do on a follow-up test.They were allowed to quickly glance over the second test sheet so that theycould see that it involved the same kind of questions-and, importantly, that noanswers had been"mistakenly"printed at the bottom this time. Theresearchers reasoned that if the students who had cheated realized thatcheating' an option the second time around, they should predict they wouldn'tdo as well on this second test.
Not so. Self-deception won theday. The people who'd had access to the answers predicted, on average, thatthey'd get higher scores on the follow-up—equivalent to giving them something like a 10-point IQ boost. Whentested, however, they scored far lower.
The researchers ran anotherexperiment to check that the effect was really due to the cheaters'inflated beliefin their own abilities. In this experiment, students were offered a cash rewardfor accurately predicting their scores on the second test. Sure enough, thosewho had been given the opportunity to cheat overestimated their ability andlost out—earning20% less than the other students.
The implication is that peoplein Chance's experiment—people very much like you and me—had trickedthemselves into believing they were smarter than they were. There may bebenefits from doing this—confidence, satisfaction, ormore easily gaining the trust of others—but there arealso disadvantages. Whenever circumstances change and you need to accuratelypredict how well you'll do, it can cost to believe you're better than you are.
That self-deception has itscosts has some interesting implications. Morally, most of us would say thatself-deception is wrong. But aside from whether self-deception isundesirable,we should expect it to be present in all of us to some degree(because of the benefits), but to be limited as well (because of the costs).
Self-deception isn't somethingthat is always better in larger doses—there must be an amount of it for which the benefits outweigh thecosts, most of the time. We're probably all self-deceiving to some degree. Theirony being, because it is self-deception, we can't know how often.
Which of the following can best explain the underlined word'downside'in Paragraph 1?
A.Benefit. B.Disadvantage. C.Possibility. D.Disconnection.正确答案B
