Saving My Revised GRE Issue 《拯救我的新GRE Issue》(Manuscript under Review)
© Copy Right 2012 by James Jiang. All Rights Reserved
Authorized and printed at Toronto, Canada, June 2012
Supplementary Ref
009
寻求刺激
Sensation Seeking
Excerpt from Melvin Konner. Whey the Reckless Survive and Other Secrets of Human Nature,
Viking, Penguin Group, 1990
People don’t think clearly about risk. This no
mere insult, but a conclusion that emerges
from attempts by behavioral scientists to
understand how people make decisions. We
ignore some risks and overestimates others.
For example, the number of deaths linked to a
cigarette smoking in the United States is
equivalent to three jumbo jets full of
passengers crashing daily, day in and day out.
We have fifty thousand traffic fatalities a
year—almost the number of deaths we
suffered during our entire involvement in
Vietnam. Half involve drunk drivers, and a
large proportion would be prevented by seat
belts or air bag. Compulsive gamblers have
unrealistically high expectations of winning.
On the average, in the larger game of life, they
also have unrealistically high expectations of
protection against losing.
We prefer voluntary risks to involuntary
ones—or, put another way, risks that we feel
we have some control over to those that we
feel we don’t. By the way we drive and react to
cues on the road, we think, we reduce our risk
to such low level that seat belts add little
protection. But in case of the terrorist attack or
the nuclear-plant accident, we feel we have no
handle on the risks.
We prefer familiar risks to strange ones. The
homicide during a mugging, or the airliner
hijacked in Athens, or the nerve gas leaking
from an armed forces train, get our attention
and so loom much larger in our calculations
than they should in terms of real risk.
Deaths that come in bunches—the jumbo-jet
crash of the disaster movie—are more
frightening than those that come in a steady
trickle, even though the latter may add up to
more risk when the counting is done.
The environment of our ancestors must have
been full of danger. “Nothing ventured, nothing
gained” must have been a cardinal rule; and
yet venturing meant exposure to grave risk:
fire, heights, cold, hunger, predators, human
enemies. And all this risk has to be seen
against a background of mortality from causes
outside of human control—especially disease.
To die, in Darwinian terms, is not to lose the
game. Individuals risk or sacrifice their lives for
their kin. Sacrifice for offspring is ubiquitous in
the animal world, and the examples of
maternal defense of the young in mammals
and male death in the act of copulation in
insects have become familiar. During our own
evolution small, kin-based groups might have
gained much from having a minority of
reckless sensation seekers in the
ranks—people who wouldn’t hesitate to snatch
a child from a pack of wild dogs or fight an
approaching grass fire with a counterfire.
In any case, both sensation seekers and
people in general should have taken their risks
selectively. They may have found it
advantageous to take risks with the seemingly
controllable and familiar, even while
exaggerating the risk of the unknown, and
hedging it around with all sorts of taboo and
ritual.
【冒险与性格】 People who are high in
sensation seeking are also less tolerant of
sensory deprivation. They are more likely to
use drugs and become involved in sexual
experiences, to be drunk in public, and to
volunteer for high-risk activities and unusual
experiments. Some people seek higher levels
of stimulation and activity than others.
The Sensation Seeking Scale (SSS) was
designed to assess the personality traits of
Saving My Revised GRE Issue 《拯救我的新GRE Issue》(Manuscript under Review)
© Copy Right 2012 by James Jiang. All Rights Reserved
Authorized and printed at Toronto, Canada, June 2012
thrill and adventure seeking, disinhibition,
experience seeking, and susceptibility to
boredom. Sensation-seeking scales measure
the level of stimulation or arousal a person will
seek. Marvin Zuckerman and his colleagues
have identified four factors that are involved in
sensation seeking:
Thrill and Adventure Seeking (TAS):
desire to engage in sports or activities
involving speed and danger
Disinhibition (Dis): desire for social and
sexual disinhibition
Experience Seeking (ES): desire for
experience through the mind and senses,
travel, and a non-conforming lifestyle
Boredom Susceptibility (BS): aversion to
repetition, routine, and dull people
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