2017考研英语拓展阅读：从步态看性格

　　考研英语阅读能力提升需要不断地积累练习，通过多阅读来积累词汇，提升阅读速度，强化把握主旨能力。2017考研复习之初，时间相对充裕，新东方在线建议大家每天多做一些阅读，可娱乐也可增长见闻，还能提升能力。下面一篇文章是关于从步态看性格。

2017考研英语拓展阅读：从步态看性格

　　If you saw a man walk into a bar with a John Wayne swagger, you might assume that he’s a confident, tough kind of guy.

　　如果你看见一个酷似约翰·韦恩的人招摇地走进一个酒吧，你可能会认为他是个自信、坚韧的家伙。

　　Or perhaps you’d have less polite thoughts. Either way, you probably wouldn’t be able to help yourself from jumping to conclusions about his personality based on his gait.

　　或者你对他的想法没那么客气。无论如何，你可能情不自禁地根据他的步态对他的性格下结论。

　　Psychologists have been studying these assumptions for well over three quarters of a century, and their findings suggest that most of us do tend to make very similar interpretations of other people’s personalities based on their walking style. But how accurate are these assumptions?

　　心理学家对这些假设已经研究了超过了四分之三个世纪了，他们的研究结果表明，我们大多数人倾向于根据别人走路的风格对其性格作出非常相似的假设。但是这些假设有多准确呢?

　　US psychologists in the late 1980s found that there are broadly two kinds of walk, which could be characterised by either a more youthful or older style of movement.

　　80年代后期美国心理学家发现了主要两种走路的姿态，这可以分别划分为年轻或年长的风格。

　　Furthermore, the observers assumed that people who walked with a younger style were happier and more powerful.

　　更进一步，观察者认为走年轻风格的人更快乐，更强大。

　　But the study didn’t address the question of whether these assumptions are accurate.

　　但这个研究没有解决这些猜测是否准确的问题。

　　For that, we must turn to a British and Swiss study published just a few years ago, which compared people’s ratings of their own personalities with the assumptions other people made about them based on point-light displays of their walks.

　　为此，我们必须求助于几年前英国和瑞士的一份研究，它比较了人们根据其他人的步态对其性格作出的猜测。

　　Their results suggested again that there are two main walking styles, although this study described them in slightly different terms: the first was said to be an expansive, loose style, which observers saw as a mark of adventurousness, extraversion, trustworthiness and warmth; the other was a slow, relaxed style, which observers interpreted as a sign of emotional stability.

　　他们的结果再次显示了两种主要的步态，虽然这份研究用不同的词汇来描述：第一种是豁达的，散漫的步态，观察者认为这是富于探险的，外向的，值得信赖的和温暖的;另一种是缓慢，轻松的步态，观察者认为这是情绪稳定的标志。

　　But crucially, the observers’ judgments were wrong – these two different walking styles were not actually correlated with these traits, at least not based on the walkers’ ratings of their own personalities.

　　但重要的是，观察者的判断是错的——这两种走路方式实际上和这些特征没有关系，至少并不基于对走路者的性格猜测。

　　The message from all this research is that we treat a person’s gait much like we treat their face, clothing or accent – as a source of information about the kind of person they are.

　　该研究所给出的信息是我们看步态就像看脸，看衣服或听声音一样——这些都是判断这个人的类型的信息来源。

　　It’s just that, whereas the evidence suggests our assessments are rather good for faces, we tend to make false assumptions based on gait.

　　不过，证据显示我们对脸的判断还不错，但我们对步态的判断却常出错，就是这样。

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