2020年12月四级第1套仔细阅读 Passage 2 原文翻译及答案解析

Picture this: You're at a movie theater food stand loading up on snacks. You have a choice of a small, medium or large soda. The small is $3.50 and the large is $5.50. It's a tough decision: The small size may not last you through the whole movie, but $5.50 for some sugary drink seems ridiculous. But there's a third option, a medium soda for $5.25. Medium may be the perfect amount of soda for you, but the large is only a quarter more. If you're like most people, you end up buying the large (and taking a bathroom break mid-show).

想象一下：你正在电影院食品摊选购零食。你有小杯、中杯或大杯苏打水的选择。小杯售价3.50美元，大杯售价5.50美元。这真是个难题：小杯可能不够你撑过整场电影，但花5.50美元买杯含糖饮料似乎太离谱。不过，还有第三个选项：中杯苏打水，售价5.25美元。中杯的量可能对你正合适，但大杯只贵了25美分。如果你和大多数人一样，最终会买大杯（并在放映中途去洗手间）。

If you're wondering who would buy the medium soda, the answer is almost no one. In fact, there's a good chance the marketing department purposely priced the medium soda as a decoy (诱饵), making you more likely to buy the large soda rather than the small.

如果你想知道谁会买中杯苏打水，答案是几乎没人。事实上，营销部门很可能故意将中杯苏打水定价为诱饵，使你更倾向于购买大杯而非小杯。

I have written about this peculiarity in human nature before with my friend Dan Ariely, who studied this phenomenon extensively after noticing pricing for subscriptions (订阅) to The Economist. The digital subscription was $59, the print subscription was $125, and the print plus digital subscription was also $125. No one in their right mind would buy the print subscription when you could get digital as well for the same price, so why was it even an option? Ariely ran an experiment and found that when only the two "real" choices were offered, more people chose the less-expensive digital subscription. But the addition of the bad option made people much more likely to choose the more expensive print plus digital option.

我以前和我的朋友丹·艾瑞里一起写过关于人性的这一特点，他在注意到《经济学人》的订阅价格后广泛研究了这一现象。数字订阅是59美元，印刷版订阅是125美元，印刷版加数字订阅也是125美元。没有人会在可以以同样价格获得数字版的情况下购买印刷版订阅，所以为什么它甚至是一个选项呢？艾瑞里进行了一项实验，发现当只提供两个“真正”的选择时，更多人选择了更便宜的数字订阅。但增加一个糟糕的选项后，人们更有可能选择更昂贵的印刷版加数字订阅。

Brain scientists call this effect "asymmetric dominance" and it means that people gravitate toward the choice nearest a clearly inferior option. Marketing professors call it the decoy effect, which is certainly easier to remember. Lucky for consumers, almost no one in the business community understands it.

脑科学家称这种效应为“不对称优势”，意思是人们倾向于选择最接近明显较差选项的那个选择。市场营销教授称其为诱饵效应，这当然更容易记住。对消费者来说幸运的是，商界几乎没人理解这一点。

The decoy effect works because of the way our brains assign value when making choices. Value is almost never absolute; rather, we decide an object's value relative to our other choices. If more options are introduced, the value equation changes.

诱饵效应之所以起作用，是因为我们的大脑在做出选择时分配价值的方式。价值几乎从来不是绝对的；相反，我们根据其他选择来决定一个物体的价值。如果引入更多选项，价值方程式就会改变。