Celebs set bad example如痴如狂的“名人效应”导读:生活中,“名人效应”随处可见。一些名人的确可以给人以启迪与鼓励,但许多人一味地盲目崇拜名人,这就不可取了。
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” You may recognize this brilliant quote from genius physicist Albert Einstein.
你可能会记得天才物理学家爱因斯坦有句至理名言:“疯子就是反复做着相同的事情,却期望有一天会出现不同的结果。” However, a quick Google search shows that this quote first appeared in print in 1981, in a pamphlet by Narcotics Anonymous (a US organization that helps people quit smoking), some 25 years after the scientist died. Many famous people have probably said less than half the things you’ve heard them being quoted on. This is because quotes are more quotable and inspirational when they come from those famous for their success and wisdom. Misattributing quotes is just one aspect of our tendency to give celebrities more credit than they rightfully deserve. Nowadays, it’s not just wisdom we want to gain from famous people, we copy everything from soccer players’ hairstyles, to pop singers’ fashion sense and movie stars’ exercise regimes. In a recent BBC radio program, social anthropologist Jamie Tehrani tried to explain our obsession with celebrities from an anthropologist’s perspective. Fame is a powerful cultural magnet. As a hyper-social species, Tehrani explains, humans acquire knowledge, ideas and skills by copying from others, rather than through individual trial and error. However, we pay far more attention to the habits and behaviors demonstrated by famous people than those demonstrated by ordinary folks in our community. Tehrani calls this “prestige-biased learning”. Prestige is a form of social status that is based on respect and admiration for members of one’s community. In primitive society, if a hunter is extremely good at hunting, he would be well respected in his tribe and other hunters would study his hunting skills or copy his method of making weapons. Prestige-biased learning has been crucial to the evolutionary success of our species. In the past, Tehrani said, any useless traits we acquired as a result of prestige-biased learning were offset by the benefits of picking up useful skills. So, in the long run, it was an effective, adaptive strategy. But in the modern world, politicians become famous through sex scandals and singers sell more albums after they die from a drug overdose. Bob Beckel from USA Today bemoans today’s pop culture, which awards celebrity status to people who have done nothing to deserve it, “other than being outrageous enough to get themselves in the tabloids”. Being famous has become an end in itself. In primitive society, a good hunter was a role model because people could learn from him and had a better chance of surviving. Today, we need to ask ourselves if someone is really a good role model and what superior knowledge or skill they can teach us before putting them on a pedestal. |
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