「首发」沃邦名师3月10日亚太SAT考试考情速递(14)

To flesh outthis idea, the pair carried out five sets of tests, with volunteers rangingfrom farmers in India to undergraduate students in Toronto. In one test,the farmers were offered a financial incentive to open a bank account and makea deposit within six months. The researchers predicted those approached in Junewould consider a deadline before December 31st as like-the-present. Thoseapproached in July, by contrast, received a deadline into the next year, andwere expected to think of their deadline as unlike-the-present. The distinctionworked. Those with a deadline in the same year were nearly four times morelikely to open the account immediately as those for whom the deadline lay inthe following year. Arbitrary though calendars may be in dividing uptime"s continuous flow, they influence the way humans think about time.
The effect canmanifest itself in even subtler ways. In another set of experiments,undergraduate students were given a calendar on a Wednesday and were asked tosuggest an appropriate day to carry out certain tasks before the followingSunday. The trick was that some were given a calendar with all of the weekdayscoloured purple, with weekends in beige (making a visual distinction between aWednesday and the following Sunday). Others were given a calendar in whichevery other week, Monday to Sunday, was a solid colour (meaning that aWednesday and the following Sunday were thus in the same week, and in the samecolour). Even this minor visual cue affected how like- or unlike-the-presentthe respondents tended to view task priorities.