【每日学英语02】Scientific American（科学美国人）

Scientific American（科学美国人）
Why Moral Emotions Go Viral Online
为什么道德情感会在网上疯传

Social media is changing the character of our political conversations. As many have pointed out, our attention is a scarce resource that politicians and journalists are constantly fighting to attract, and the online world has become a primary trigger of our moral outrage. These two ideas, it turns out, are fundamentally related.

社交媒体正在改变我们政治对话的特征。正如许多人所指出的那样，我们的注意力是政治家和记者不断争取吸引的稀缺资源，而网络世界已成为我们道德义愤的主要导火索。事实证明，这两点从根本上是相关的。

It occurred to us that the way people scroll through their social media feeds is very similar to a classic method psychologists use to measure people’s ability to pay attention. When we mindlessly browse social media, we are rapidly presenting a stream of verbal stimuli to ourselves.

我们突然想到，人们浏览社交媒体信息的方式与心理学家用来衡量人们集中注意力能力的经典方法非常相似。当我们无意识地浏览社交媒体时，我们正快速向自己呈现一连串的文字刺激。

Psychologists have been studying this issue in the lab for decades, displaying to subjects a rapid succession of words, one after another, in the blink of an eye. In the lab, people are asked to find a target word among a collection of other words. Once they find it, there’s a short window of time in which that word captures their attention. If there’s a second target word in that window, most people don’t even see it—almost as if they had blinked with their eyes open.

心理学家们在实验室里研究这个问题已经有几十年了，在眨眼之间向受试者展示了一个接一个的快速连续的单词。在实验室里，人们被要求从一组其他单词集合中找到目标单词。一旦他们找到了这个词，就会有一个短暂的时间窗口，这个词吸引他们的注意力。如果在那段时间里还有第二个目标词，大多数人甚至都忽略了——几乎就像他们睁眼眨眼睛一样。