The Advantages of Closing a Few Doors

置之死地而后生 选自纽约时报

The next time you’re juggling options — which friend to see, which house to buy, which career to pursue — try asking yourself this question: What would Xiang Yu do?

该见哪个朋友，买哪幢房子，做什么事业，下一次当你面对这些令人眩晕的选择时，不妨问自己这样一个问题：项羽是怎么做的？

Xiang Yu was a Chinese general in the third century B.C. who took his troops across the Yangtze River into enemy territory and performed an experiment in decision making. He crushed his troops’ cooking pots and burned their ships.

项羽是公元前3世纪中国古代的一位将军。在长江率部身陷敌军包围圈的时候他做出了一个赌博式的决定：“破釜沉舟”。

He explained this was to focus them on moving forward — a motivational speech that was not appreciated by many of the soldiers watching their retreat option go up in flames. But General Xiang Yu would be vindicated, both on the battlefield and in the annals of social science research.

他将此解释为使自己的士兵孤注一掷在拼杀向前的战斗中，尽管这种鼓动性的讲演并不为那些眼睁睁的看着退路在硝烟中被截断的士兵所领悟。但无论如何，项羽的做法是值得信服的，无论是战场的结局还是社会学研究都证实了这一点。

He is one of the role models in Dan Ariely’s new book, “Predictably Irrational,” an entertaining look at human foibles like the penchant for keeping too many options open. General Xiang Yu was a rare exception to the norm, a warrior who conquered by being unpredictably rational.

在丹-埃雷里的新书中，他也是其中的范例之一。所谓“预见的不合理性”正是对人类喜欢为自己留有余地的弱点一种戏谑的看法。西楚霸王是很少的例外之一，他最终输给了所谓“不可预见的合理性”。

Most people can’t make such a painful choice, not even the students at a bastion of rationality like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Dr. Ariely is a professor of behavioral economics. In a series of experiments, hundreds of students could not bear to let their options vanish, even though it was obviously a dumb strategy (and they weren’t even asked to burn anything).

没有多少人能够做出这样痛苦的抉择，即使是身为行为经济学教授埃雷里所在的麻省理工学院理性熏陶下的学生。在一系列的实验中，数百名学生都无法承受市区选择的境地。

The experiments involved a game that eliminated the excuses we usually have for refusing to let go. In the real world, we can always tell ourselves that it’s good to keep options open. 这些实验包含了一个同样的游戏规则。那就是迫使人们摒弃一些令我们不能放弃某些选择的理由。在现实世界里，我们总是提醒自己留些后路的好处。

You don’t even know how a camera’s burst-mode flash works, but you persuade yourself to pay for the extra feature just in case. You no longer have anything in common with someone who keeps calling you, but you hate to just zap the relationship.

你甚至不知道闪光灯的作用却仍然要多花些钱以防万一，有些话不投机的人总是联系你，你却不能彻底结束这种关系。

Your child is exhausted from after-school soccer, ballet and Chinese lessons, but you won’t let her drop the piano lessons. They could come in handy! And who knows? Maybe they will.

你的孩子从足球培训班或是芭蕾，中文班回来已是筋疲力尽，你却还让他练习钢琴。是的，他们会用得上的。谁又知道呢？或许吧。

In the M.I.T. experiments, the students should have known better. They played a computer game that paid real cash to look for money behind three doors on the screen. (You can play it yourself, without pay, at tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com.) After they opened a door by clicking on it, each subsequent click earned a little money, with the sum varying each time.

在麻省理工学院的实验中，参与的学生应该有更好的理解。他们需要花钱在电脑屏幕上的三扇门后寻找钱币（你也可以免费玩这个游戏，游戏网址是tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com）。在用鼠标点开一扇门之后，接下来的每一次点击都会获得数额不等的奖励。

As each player went through the 100 allotted clicks, he could switch rooms to search for higher payoffs, but each switch used up a click to open the new door. The best strategy was to quickly check out the three rooms and settle in the one with the highest rewards.

每一个玩家都有100次点击的机会。玩家也可以利用一个门上的开关来寻求更高的回报，但这样也会失去开启一扇门的机会。最佳的策略就是迅速的查看三个房间然后确定其中的一个寻求最高的奖励。

Even after students got the hang of the game by practicing it, they were flummoxed when a new visual feature was introduced. If they stayed out of any room, its door would start shrinking and eventually disappear.

尽管许多学生都通过练习知道了其中的诀窍，他们在新的视觉效果出现的时候仍然会感到惊慌失措。那就是无论他们呆在哪一个房间，身后的门会慢慢的关闭直至消失。

They should have ignored those disappearing doors, but the students couldn’t. They wasted so many clicks rushing back to reopen doors that their earnings dropped 15 percent. Even when the penalties for switching grew stiffer — besides losing a click, the players had to pay a cash fee — the students kept losing money by frantically keeping all their doors open.

他们应该忽略那些消失的门，但他们做不到这一点。他们浪费了太多的点击机会去回头打开那些即将关闭的门，也因此损失了15%的收获。尽管对使用开关的惩罚加强（除了少一次点击机会，还要加一部分游戏费），但许多学生还是为了要保证所有的门都开着而损失了许多钱。

Why were they so attached to those doors? The players, like the parents of that overscheduled piano student, would probably say they were just trying to keep future options open. But that’s not the real reason, according to Dr. Ariely and his collaborator in the experiments, Jiwoong Shin, an economist who is now at Yale.

为什么他们如此热衷于那些门呢？这些参与游戏者就像上文提到的那些为孩子安排过多钢琴课和补习班的家长一样，或许是为将来多留一些余地。但是埃雷里博士和她本次实验的合作者，耶鲁大学的经济学家申纪武认为那并非真正的原因所在。

They plumbed the players’ motivations by introducing yet another twist. This time, even if a door vanished from the screen, players could make it reappear whenever they wanted. But even when they knew it would not cost anything to make the door reappear, they still kept frantically trying to prevent doors from vanishing.

为了研究玩家的这种动机，他们采取了另一种办法。这一次，即便一扇门从屏幕上消失，玩家也可以根据自己的意愿让它重现。但是在这样的情况下，玩家仍然会疯狂般的阻止那些门的消失。

Apparently they did not care so much about maintaining flexibility in the future. What really motivated them was the desire to avoid the immediate pain of watching a door close.

显然他们并不去在意对将来保持灵活变通。他们这样做实际是为了避免一种看到们被关上的现时的恐惧。

“Closing a door on an option is experienced as a loss, and people are willing to pay a price to avoid the emotion of loss,” Dr. Ariely says. In the experiment, the price was easy to measure in lost cash. In life, the costs are less obvious — wasted time, missed opportunities. If you are afraid to drop any project at the office, you pay for it at home.

埃雷里说：关上一扇门就如同经历一种缺失，而人们则愿意为避免这种确实感付出一定的代价。在这个实验中，代价可以用金钱的损失来衡量。而在生活中，这种损失则不那么明显可见，如浪费的时间，错过的机会等。如果你是一个工作狂，你就会付出家庭的代价。

“We may work more hours at our jobs,” Dr. Ariely writes in his book, “without realizing that the childhood of our sons and daughters is slipping away. Sometimes these doors close too slowly for us to see them vanishing.”

在书中，埃雷里写道：我们总是花在工作上更多的时间，却忽略了我们的子女，他们的童年就这样流走了。有时那些门在不知不觉慢慢的从我们的视线中消失了。

Dr. Ariely, one of the most prolific authors in his field, does not pretend that he is above this problem himself. When he was trying to decide between job offers from M.I.T. and Stanford, he recalls, within a week or two it was clear that he and his family would be more or less equally happy in either place. But he dragged out the process for months because he became so obsessed with weighing the options.

作为在这一领域著作颇丰的一位作家，埃雷里并不否认自己本身也会受到这种问题的困扰。他回忆说在选择到麻省理工学院还是斯坦福大学任教时，在起初的一两个周内他和家人觉得两个地方都还惬意。甚至几个月的时间里，他都一直为权衡这两个选择心思疲惫。

“I’m just as workaholic and prone to errors as anyone else,” he says.. “I have way too many projects, and it would probably be better for me and the academic community if I focused my efforts. But every time I have an idea or someone offers me a chance to collaborate, I hate to give it up.”

他说：我是一个工作狂，也会像其他人一样经常犯错。我接手了许多项目，如果我能专心致志无论对自己还是研究院来说都是一件好事。但是每当我有什么新想法或是有人给我一个合作的机会，我都不愿放弃。

So what can be done? One answer, Dr. Ariely said, is to develop more social checks on overbooking. He points to marriage as an example: “In marriage, we create a situation where we promise ourselves not to keep options open. We close doors and announce to others we’ve closed doors.”

所以能够做什么呢？埃雷里说：只有一个答案，那就是精心筛选过多的选择。他以婚姻为例做出说明。所谓婚姻，就是我们要给自己一个契约，使自己处于一个无路可退的境地。我们关上其余的门然后告诉人们我们已经做出了选择。

Or we can just try to do it on our own. Since conducting the door experiments, Dr. Ariely says, he has made a conscious effort to cancel projects and give away his ideas to colleagues. He urges the rest of us to resign from committees, prune holiday card lists, rethink hobbies and remember the lessons of door closers like Xiang Yu.

或许我们可以试着自己去做。埃雷里博士说，自从引入了这个实验，他已经有意识的放弃了一些项目和一些合作者的想法。他呼吁我们其余的人也要下定决心，像项羽一样做一个懂得放弃的人。

If the general’s tactics seem too crude, Dr. Ariely recommends another role model, Rhett Butler, for his supreme moment of unpredictable rationality at the end of his marriage. Scarlett, like the rest of us, can’t bear the pain of giving up an option, but Rhett recognizes the marriage’s futility and closes the door with astonishing elan. Frankly, he doesn’t give a damn.

如果你认为项羽将军的计策太过残酷的话，埃雷里为你推荐了另一个榜样——赖特-巴特勒。 只因他最后未可预见的合理的婚姻结局。斯佳丽，正如我们一样，不能承受放弃一个选择的痛苦，但当巴特勒万念俱灰毅然离开的时候。坦率地说，他根本不在意什么。

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