首页
外语
计算机
考研
公务员
职业资格
财经
工程
司法
医学
专升本
自考
实用职业技能
登录
外语
The Truth about Lying Ricky Gervais’s new film, The Invention of Lying, is about a world where lying doesn’t exist, which me
The Truth about Lying Ricky Gervais’s new film, The Invention of Lying, is about a world where lying doesn’t exist, which me
admin
2012-10-11
25
问题
The Truth about Lying
Ricky Gervais’s new film, The Invention of Lying, is about a world where lying doesn’t exist, which means that everybody tells the truth, and everybody believes everything everybody else says. "I’ve always hated you," a man tells a work colleague. "He seems nice, if a bit fat," a woman says about her date. It’s all truth, all the time, at whatever the cost. Until one day, when Mark, a down-on-his-luck loser played by Gervais, discovers a thing called "lying" and what it can get him. Within days, Mark is rich, famous, and courting the girl of his dreams. And because nobody knows what "lying" is, he goes on, happily living what has become a complete and utter farce.
It’s meant to be funny, but it’s also a more serious commentary on us all. As Americans, we like to think we value the truth. Time and time again, public-opinion polls show that honesty is among the top five characteristics we want in a leader, friend, or lover, the world is full of woeful stories about the tragic consequences of betrayal. At the same time, deception is all around us. We are lied to by government officials and public figures to a disturbing degree; many of our social relationships are based on little white lies we tell each other. We deceive our children, only to be deceived by them in return. And the average person, says psychologist Robert Feldman, the author of a new book on lying, tells at least three lies in the first 10 minutes of a conversation. "There’s always been a lot of lying," says Feldman, whose new book, The Liar in Your Life, came out this month. "But I do think we’re seeing a kind of cultural shift where we’re lying more, it’s easier to lie, and in some ways it’s almost more acceptable."
As Paul Ekman, one of Feldman’s longtime lying colleagues and the inspiration behind the Fox TV series "Lie To Me," defines it, a liar is a person who "intends to mislead," "deliberately," without being asked to do so by the target of the lie. Which doesn’t mean that all lies are equally toxic: some are simply habitual—"My pleasure! "—while others might be well-meaning white lies. But each, Feldman argues, is harmful, because of the standard it creates. And the more lies we tell, even if they’re little white lies, the more deceptive we and society become.
We are a culture of liars, to put it bluntly, with deceit so deeply ingrained in our mind that we hardly even notice we’re engaging in it. Spam e-mail (垃圾邮件), deceptive advertising, the everyday pleasantries we don’t really mean—"It’s so great to meet you! " "I love that dress"—have, as Feldman puts it, become "a white noise we’ve learned to neglect." And Feldman also argues that cheating is more common today than ever. The Josephson Institute, a nonprofit focused on youth ethics, concluded in a 2008 survey of nearly 30,000 high school students that "cheating in school continues to be spreading, and it’s getting worse." In that survey, 64 percent of students said they’d cheated on a test during the past year, up from 60 percent in 2006. Another recent survey, by Junior Achievement, revealed that more than a third of teens believe lying, cheating, or copying can be necessary to succeed, while a brand-new study, commissioned by the publishers of Feldman’s book, shows that 18- to 34-year-olds—those of us fully reared in this lying culture—deceive more frequently than the general population.
Teaching us to lie is not the purpose of Feldman’s book. His subtitle, in fact, is "the way to truthful relationships." But if his book teaches us anything, it’s that we should sharpen our skills—and use them with abandon.
Liars get what they want. They avoid punishment, and they win others’ affection. Liars make themselves sound smart and intelligent, they attain power over those of us who believe them, and they often use their lies to rise up in the professional world. Many liars have fun doing it. And many more take pride in getting away with it.
As Feldman notes, there is an evolutionary basis for deception: in the wild, animals use deception to "play dead" when threatened. But in the modern world, the motives of our lying are more selfish. Research has linked socially successful people to those who are good liars. Students who succeed academically get picked for the best colleges, despite the fact that, as one recent Duke University study found, as many as 90 percent of high-schoolers admit to cheating. Even lying adolescents are more popular among their peers.
And all it takes is a quick flip of the remote to see how our public figures fare when they get caught in a lie: Clinton keeps his wife and goes on to become a national hero. Fabricating author James Frey gets a million-dollar book deal. Eliot Spitzer’s wife stands by his side, while "Appalachian hiker" Mark Sanford still gets to keep his post. If everyone else is being rewarded for lying, don’t we need to lie, too, just to keep up?
But what’s funny is that even as we admit to being liars, study after study shows that most of us believe we can tell when others are lying to us. And while lying may be easy, spotting a liar is far from it. A nervous sweat or shifty eyes can certainly mean a person’s uncomfortable, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re lying. Gaze aversion, meanwhile, has more to do with shyness than actual deception. Even polygraph machines are unreliable. And according to one study, by researcher Bella DePaulo, we’re only able to differentiate a lie from truth only 47 percent of the time, less than if we guessed randomly. "Basically everything we’ve heard about catching a liar is wrong," says Feldman, who heads the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Ekman, meanwhile, has spent decades studying micro-facial expressions of liars the split-second eyebrow arch that shows surprise when a spouse asks who was on the phone; the furrowed nose that gives away a hint of disgust when a person says "I love you." He’s trained everyone from the Secret Service to the TSA, and believes that with close study, it’s possible to identify those tiny emotions. The hard part, of course, is proving them. "A lot of times, it’s easier to believe," says Feldman. "It takes a lot of cognitive effort to think about whether someone is lying to us."
Which means that more often than not, we’re like the poor dumb souls of The Invention of Lying, hanging on a liar’s every word, no matter how untruthful they may be.
Shyness may be indicated by______.
选项
答案
gaze aversion
解析
空白处应为名词或名词词组。原文该句表明gaze aversion与shyness有关,也就是说,gaze aversion是shyness的一个指标,因此本题应填写gaze aversion。
转载请注明原文地址:https://jikaoti.com/ti/NNrFFFFM
0
大学英语六级
相关试题推荐
A、Whatchemicalstearsarecomposedof.B、Whethercryingreallyhelpsusfeelbetter.C、Whysomepeopletendtocrymoreoftent
Peoplehavewonderedforalongtimehowtheirpersonalitiesandbehaviorsareformed.Itisnoteasytoexplainwhyoneperson
Peoplehavewonderedforalongtimehowtheirpersonalitiesandbehaviorsareformed.Itisnoteasytoexplainwhyoneperson
Peoplehavewonderedforalongtimehowtheirpersonalitiesandbehaviorsareformed.Itisnoteasytoexplainwhyoneperson
A、Lookingforanapartment.B、Takingasuburbanexcursion.C、Lookingforajob.D、Askingthemanforhisopinions.A综合理解题。女士对男士说
Movingfarmorequicklythanmanyhadthoughtlikelyorpossible,lawmakersinthe10-memberHouse-Senatecommitteeannouncedth
Theinventionofthecomputer________businessprocedure.
TheTruthaboutLyingRickyGervais’snewfilm,TheInventionofLying,isaboutaworldwherelyingdoesn’texist,whichme
TheTruthaboutLyingRickyGervais’snewfilm,TheInventionofLying,isaboutaworldwherelyingdoesn’texist,whichme
随机试题
如果一个大型工程项目在签订施工承包合同后,设计资料的深度和其他条件还不足以编制比较具体的施工总进度计划时,则可先编制()。
A.脉虚者人参汤下,脉实者银花、薄荷汤下B.蜜丸,空心盐白汤送下C.蜜丸,清晨温酒下D.蜜丸,午时姜汤下E.蜜丸,空心酒化下,不拘时
女,29岁,哺乳期,右乳房肿痛2天,无发热,体检:右乳房肿胀,内象限有压痛,无波动感根据以上情况应采取哪项措施
某种饼干生产用的抗氧化剂,成分为:抗坏血酸、d/1-生育酚、蔗糖酯、乙醇、磷酸二氢钠
教师的医疗同当地国家公务员享受同等的待遇;()对教师进行身体健康检查,并因地制宜安排教师进行休养。
从所给的四个选项中,选择最合适的一个填入问号处,使之呈现一定的规律:
为了加强城市管理,提升城市文明水平。市管理委员会决定举行一次监督城管执法的市民招募会,请你提出几点建议。
下列关于我国的HPV疫苗的说法错误的是()。
设n阶非零实方阵A的伴随矩阵为A*,且A*=AT.证明|A|≠0.
Inthecourseoftime,Mr.Earnshawbegantofail.Hehadbeenactiveandhealthy,yethisstrengthlefthimsuddenly;andwhen
最新回复
(
0
)