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2013年考研英语一完型填空原文出自《The Economist》Jun 16th 2012

原文题目 ：A question of judgment

A NEVER-ENDING flow of information is the lot of most professionals. Whether it comes in the form of

lawyers’ cases, doctors’ patients or even journalists’ stories, this information naturally gets broken up into

pieces that can be tackled one at a time during the course of a given day. In theory, a decision made when

handling one of these pieces should not have much, if any, impact on similar but unrelated subsequent

decisions. Yet Uri Simonsohn of the University of Pennsylvaniaand Francesca Gino at Harvard report in

Psychological Science that this is not how things work out in practice.

Dr Simonsohn and Dr Gino knew from studies done in other laboratories that people are, on the whole,

poor at considering background information when making individual decisions. At first glance this might seem

like a strength that grants the ability to make judgments which are unbiased by external factors. But in a world

of quotas and limits—in other words, the world in which most professional people operate—the two

researchers suspected that it was actually a weakness. They speculated that an inability to consider the big

picture was leading decision-makers to be biased by the daily samples of information they were working with.

For example, they theorised that a judge fearful of appearing too soft on crime might be more likely to send

someone to prison if he had already sentenced five or six other defendants only to probation on that day.

To test this idea, they turned their attention to the university-admissions process. Admissions officers

interview hundreds of applicants every year, at a rate of 4½ a day, and can offer entry to about 40% of them. In

theory, the success of an applicant should not depend on the few others chosen randomly for interview during

the same day, but Dr Simonsohn and Dr Gino suspected the truth was otherwise.

They studied the results of 9,323 MBA interviews conducted by 31 admissions officers. The interviewers

had rated applicants on a scale of one to five. This scale took numerous factors, including communication

skills, personal drive, team-working ability and personal accomplishments, into consideration. The scores from

this rating were then used in conjunction with an applicant’s score on the Graduate Management Admission

Test, or GMAT, a standardised exam which is marked out of 800 points, to make a decision on whether to

accept him or her.

Dr Simonsohn and Dr Gino discovered that their hunch was right. If the score of the previous candidate

in a daily series of interviewees was 0.75 points or more higher than that of the one before that, then the score

for the next applicant would drop by an average of 0.075 points. This might sound small, but to undo the

effects of such a decrease a candidate would need 30 more GMAT points than would otherwise have been

necessary.

As for why people behave this way, Dr Simonsohn proposes that after accepting a number of strong

candidates, interviewers might form the illogical expectation that a weaker candidate “is due”. Alternatively,

he suggests that interviewers may be engaging in mental accounting that simplifies the task of maintaining a

given long-term acceptance rate, by trying to apply this rate to each daily group of candidates. Regardless of

the reason, if this sort of thinking proves to have a similar effect on the judgments of those in other fields, such

as law and medicine, it could be responsible for far worse things than the rejection of qualified business-school

candidates.

中文翻译

西蒙森博士和吉诺博士从其他实验室的研究中得知，总体而言，当人们自己做决定时，并不擅长考虑背景信息。乍一看这是优点，即能够做出不受外界因素影响的不带偏见的决定。但世界是充满了限制的，换句话说，我们置身的这个世界由专家掌控，两名研究人员怀疑这恰恰是个弱点。他们推测，不考虑大局会导致决策者被日常处理的信息影响而带有偏见。例如，他们提出理论，认为法官不敢在罪犯面前表现的太软弱，他很可能在已经宣判五六名其他被告的那天，将某人送入监狱结果却是缓刑。

为了一探究竟，他们把注意力转向了大学录取的过程。面试官每年需要面试上百个申请者，平均源-于-网-络-收-集

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每天四人半，大约会录取其中的40%。从理论上来说，申请成功的人不应依赖于同一天随机选取到的其他几名申请者，但是，西蒙逊博士和吉诺博士认为另有他因。

他们研究了由31名面试官面试的9323MBA的结果。面试官在1-5等级量表上为申请者打分。测量范围把很多因素纳入到考虑当中来，包括社交技能、个人能动性、团队合作能力和个人成就感。量表得分会与GMAT-管理学研究生入学考试(这个标准化的考试的满分为800分)的成绩来决定是否接受申请者。

西蒙森博士和吉诺博士发现他们的预测是正确的。如果在日常受访者中之前的申请人分数比前一名高出0.75分或更多，那么他下一个人平均会降低0.075分。也许看起来分数相差不大，但如果一名申请者要消除这一微小分数的影响，他GMAT就要多考出本来不需要多的30分。

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