第六十一期杂志-《夏天，让人们变得懒惰》

小山林卡

Why summer makes us lazy

夏天，让人们变得懒惰

Inhis meticulous diaries, written from 1846 to 1882, the Harvard librarian JohnLangdon Sibley complains often about the withering summer heat: “ The heatwilts & enervates me & makes me sick,”he wrote in 1852. Sibley livedbefore the age of air-conditioning, but recent research suggests that hisobservation is still a time of reduced productivity. Our brains do,figuratively, wilt.

约翰·兰登·西布利是哈佛图书馆的管理员。 在1846年至1882年间，他坚持写日记，内容详实。他多次在日记中抱怨夏天的炎热。他在1852年间写到：“天热得让人无法呼吸，我变得虚弱无力，身体很难受。”西布利活在没空调的年代。但最新的研究表明，他的日记记载了当时生产力下降的情况。形象的说，人的大脑像花朵一样，在高温环境中待的时间太长，就变蔫儿了。

Oneof the key issues is motivation: when the weather is unpleasant, no one wantsto go outside, but when the sun is shining, the air is warm, and the sky isblue, leisure calls. A 2008 study using data from the American Time Use Surveyfound that, on rainy days, men spent, on average, thirty more minutes at workthan they did on comparatively sunny days. In 2012, a group of researchers fromHarvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hillconducted a field study of Japanese bank workers and found a similar pattern:bad weather made workers more productive, as measured bythe time it took them to complete assigned tasks in a loan-applicationprocess.

为何高温会让生产力下降呢？关键原因之一是动力：天气差的时候，人不喜欢出行；一旦天气晴朗，气温宜人，人就变的懒散了。2008年，一课题组研究“美国时间使用率调查报告”的数据后，得出结论：人在雨天上班，工作时间比晴天平均多30分钟。2012年，来自哈佛大学和北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校的两队研究人员组成研究小组，去日本银行考察，研究银行员工在处理贷款申请进程时的工作效率。期间小组发现了类似情况：在坏天气中，员工处理申请的效率更高，生产力更高。

When the weather improved, in contrast, productivity fell. Todetermine why this was the case, the researchers assigned Harvard students dataentry on either sunny or rainy days. The students were randomly assigned to oneof two conditions: before starting to work, they were either shown sixphotographs of outdoor activities in nice weather, such as sailing or eatingoutdoors, or were asked to describe their daily routines. The researchers foundthat participants were less productive when they’d viewed pleasant outdoorphotographs. Instead of focusing on their work, they focused on what they’drather be doing—whether or not it was actually sunny or rainy outside (thoughthe effect was stronger on sunny days). The mere thought of pleasantalternatives made people concentrate less.

在天气好的时候，生产力却下降了。为了解其原因，研究人员找到一些哈佛学生，让他们录入数据。学生们需要在晴天或雨天情景中完成录入工作，至于他们被分配到哪种场景是随机的。开始前，研究员让学生看六张照片，内容涉及晴天乘船出行和野餐等户外活动，又或是让学生描述自己的日常生活。研究人员发现：录入效率低的学生都看过照片。录入现场外无论是艳阳天，还是阴天，这些人都想着去照片里的地方玩耍，对录入工作不上心。如果碰上艳阳天，他们会更心不在焉。

Buteach season has its share of attractive days—and a skier’s mind would likelyhave many opportunities to wander in the dead of winter. There’s evidence,however, that in summer, our thinking itself may simply become lazier. In 1994, Gerald Clore, a pioneer inresearching how ambient mood-altering phenomena affect cognition and judgment,found that pleasant weather can often lead to a disconcerting lapse inthoughtfulness. Clore’s team approached a hundred and twenty-two undergraduateson days with either good or bad weather and asked them to participate in asurvey on higher education. The better the weather, the easier it was to getthe students to buy into a less-than-solid argument:on days thatwere sunny, clear, and warm, people were equally persuaded by both strong andweak arguments in favor of end-of-year comprehensive exams. When the weatherwas rainy, cloudy, and cold, their critical faculties improved: in thatcondition, only the strong argument was persuasive. Clore and his colleaguesconcluded that pleasant weather led people to embrace moreheuristic-basedthinking—that is, they relied heavily on mental shortcuts at theexpense of actual analysis.

但每个季节也都有吸引人的地方。对于滑雪爱好者来说，冬天也是好天气。他们在头脑里盘算着各种滑雪的打算，随时付诸行动。然而证据表明：人在夏季会变得懒惰，思维也变得迟钝。杰拉尔德·克罗尔是研究环境因素如何影响认知和判断的先驱者。在1994年，他在做研究时发现：在舒适天气里，人的思维会变得不周全。克拉尔的团队与122名本科生接洽，让他们在好天气或坏天气时参加关于高等教育的研究调查。天气越好，学生越容易接受不靠谱的观点——在晴朗暖和的日子里，容易说服学生，无论是有力的还是不靠谱的说服方式，都能让他们认同年综大考这种升学选拔方式。而在雨天、阴天、或是寒冷的日子里，他们有更强的鉴别力，只认同有说服力的说法。克劳尔和他的同事断定：宜人天气里，人倾向用经验主义处理问题，从而放弃思考事物、分析问题的过程。

Summerweather—especially the muggy kind—may also reduce both our attention and ourenergy levels. In one study, high humidity lowered concentration andincreased sleepiness among participants. The weather also hurt their ability tothink critically: the hotter it got, the less likely they were to question whatthey were told.

闷热的夏天，会降低人的集中力和精力。研究表明，在高湿度环境中，参与者难以集中注意力，还会犯困。天气也会影响他们的判断力。天气越热，参与者越容易轻信别人。

Theshift toward mindlessness may be rooted in our emotions. One common finding isa link between relative sunshine and happiness: although people who live insunnier places, like Southern California, are no happier thanthose who live in the harsher conditions of the Midwest, day-to-day variationsin sunshine make a difference. People gethappier as days get longer andwarmer in the approach to the summer solstice, and less happy as days getcolder and shorter. They also report higher life satisfaction on relatively pleasant days. The happiest season, then, issummer.

人在夏天里为何会出现这些症状呢？这和人的情绪息息相关。人们普遍认为，阳光能影响情绪和幸福指数：即便加州南部阳光充足，环境比中西部地区好很多，加南居民并不比中西部居民幸福。然而随着阳光强度天天变化，加州居民的幸福感也在不断变化。夏至将至，白昼变长，体感温度舒适，人们感到更幸福。到了秋天，昼短夜长，气温下降，人的幸福感也随之降低。此外，舒适天气赋予人们满足感。最快乐的季节非夏天莫属。

Agood mood, generally speaking, has in turn been linked to the same type of heuristic, relativelymindless thinking that Clore observed in his pleasant-weather participants. Onthe flip side, a bad mood tends to stimulate morerigorous analytical thought. Weather-related mood effects can thus play out inour real-life decisions—even weighty ones. In one recent project, the psychologist Uri Simonsohn found thatstudents were more likely to enroll in a university that was famous for itsacademic rigor if they visited on days that were cloudy. When the weatherturned sour, he concluded, the value they placed onacademics increased.

通常来说，好情绪和某些大脑活动联系紧密，克拉尔实验中出现的经验主义，和惰性思维都属于此类情况。相反，坏情绪会刺激人脑，使思维活动变得缜密，并强化分析能力。在现实生活中，天气对情绪的作用会影响我们的判断，决定，甚至是重大决定。心里学家尤里·西蒙逊在最近研究中发现：学生们阴天去拜访学术气氛浓郁的大学时，更愿意申请入学（译者注：国外一些大学不需要入学考试，学生可根据高中综合成绩择校）。他总结道：天气变坏时，学生们更重视学术氛围。

There’s a limit, however, to heat’s ability to boost our mood:when temperatures reach the kind of summer highs that mark heat waves all overthe world, the effect rapidly deteriorates. In a 2013 study of perceived well-being, the economist MarieConnolly found that on days when the temperature rose above ninety degrees, thenegative impact on happiness levels was greater than the consequences of beingwidowed or dived.

然而温度提升心情的能力还是有限的。当温度上升到某一高度时，提升效果会极速下降。2013年，经济学家玛丽·康纳利对幸福感知进行了研究，她发现气温升高到华氏度90度（摄氏度32度）以上时，对幸福感造成的损伤远比离婚或丧偶的影响严重。

Conversely, the effects of heat on our brains aren’t entirelynegative. Many of the behaviors that psychologists study follow a so-calledinverted-U pattern: as one factor steadily increases, a related behaviorimproves, plateaus, and then starts to deteriorate. A famous example of this isthe Yerkes-Dodson curve, which charts the effect of stress on how well someoneperforms a given task. If we experience too little stress, or too much, ourperformance suffers. Like Goldilocks, we want to get it just right. Similarly,our cognitive abilities seem to improve up to a certain temperature, and then,as the temperature continues to rise, quickly diminish. An early study suggested that the optimal temperaturehovered around seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit. A more recent review ofthe literature shows a target of twenty-seven degrees Celsius, or roughly eighty-onedegrees Fahrenheit. (An important caveat, however, is that neither of thesestudies take humidity or sunshine into account, two major factors when it comesto assessing the influence of summer weather on behavior.)

需要指出的是，高温对大脑的影响不全是负面的。心理学家研究发现，很多行为模式都遵循所谓的倒U型曲线：x轴上的变量不断增加时，y轴上相对应变量先上升，到达最高点，然后开始下降。最著名的例子是耶克斯-多德森曲线定律，它描绘了效率和压力的关系图。压力过大或过小，工作效率都不理想。我们希望压力水平正好满足压力需求，就像金凤花姑娘，什么都是“刚刚好”（金凤花喜欢不冷不热粥，不软不硬的椅子，总之是“刚刚好”的东西，后人常用她来形容“刚刚好”）。同样在温度达到某固定数值时，认知水平会明显改善。若温度突破该值继续上升，认知能力会迅速下降。早期研究表明适合人体的最佳温度在华氏72度左右。近期有人重新测量了该温度，并在相关刊物公布了结果：27摄氏度，或是82华氏度左右。（重要提示：评估夏季气候如何影响人类行为方式时，湿度和阳光强度是最重要的参考因素。可惜的是，上述研究都没考虑这两者）。

Maybebest of all, blistering heat does give us a perfectly good reason to eat icecream: studies have shown again and again that blood glucose levels are tied to cognitive performanceand willpower. A bite of something frozen and sweet, boosting depleted glucosestores, might be just what a brain needs as the temperature spikes.

大量研究证明：血糖浓度与认知水平、意志力有密切联系。这个结论的美妙之处在于：在酷热的夏日高温里，我们可以名正言顺的吃很多冰淇淋了。吃一口冰凉美食，不光补充体内耗尽的血糖储备，还活跃了大脑，在炎炎夏日，何乐而不为呢？

翻译 by Yarina

校对 byGabriellaz

终校 by 风云侠

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翻译仅供学习交流，严禁用于商业用途

penz

夏天如此，哈哈