耶鲁校长开学演讲：学习如何辨别和应对“失实表述”

8月27日，耶鲁大学迎来新一届本科生，第23任校长彼得·沙洛维对新生作了题为“对失实表述说不”的演讲。

演讲中，沙洛维详细阐述了在耶鲁接受教育的一个重要内容：学习如何辨别和应对“失实表述”。在他看来，成为一个更加审慎的批判性思考者，才能提高而不是削弱洞察力。他说——

我们每天都在经受着各种各样 “失实表述”的狂轰滥炸，它们的杀伤力不容小觑。当前正值美国的大选季，你可以毫不费力地找到种种这样的案例。

我说这些的目的，不是为了嘲讽说谎之人，也不是为了给歪曲事实者贴上“匹诺曹”的标签。我只是想让你们明白，选择任何一种立场都可能导致夸大、歪曲或者忽略一些重要的事实，从而助长愤怒、恐惧和憎恶的情绪。

如果我的上述说法成立，那么你们在此接受教育的一个重要内容就是：学习如何辨别和应对这些失实表述。

作为学者，我们力求审慎，对于所调查和最看重之事能有理有据地表达意见。如果学术界丧失这一理想准则，我们就会迷失；如果高等学府失去这一准则，整个世界都将迷失。

以下为演讲全文，编译：杨雪欣，部分图片来自耶鲁官网。

△耶鲁大学第23任校长彼得·沙洛维

各位同事、各位家长，尤其是2020届的本科新生们，早上好！欢迎你们参加今天的活动。

2020这个数字总会让人浮想联翩。如今它已成为你们在耶鲁的班级代号，我相信无论是你们的直觉、思维敏锐性，还是意志力，都会在这里得到提升。招办的工作人员向我保证，你们是经过层层筛选以后胜出的佼佼者。

△2020届新生陆续抵校，他们来自全美50个州，留学生则来自全球50个国家和地区

尽管如此，我还是想在开学第一天这个特殊的日子里，好好思考一下你们在耶鲁就读期间，什么可能削弱你们的洞察力，什么又有可能让它得到提升？

多年来，我为很多新生上过“心理学入门”。每次讲到与社会心理学相关的内容时，我总会问学生，他们是怎么看待在不同社会情境中帮助别人这个问题的。同样是在紧急情况下，为什么有时我们会出手相助，有时却又袖手旁观？

△1373名耶鲁本科新生及其家人聆听校长演讲

我想从一个大家都知道的悲剧——Kitty Genovese事件说起。

1964年，29岁的Kitty在位于纽约皇后区Kew Garden的家中被害，这一案件引起了广泛关注和热议，也许你也听说过关于此事的好几个版本。据《纽约时报》报道，有38个人从自家窗户看到了行凶过程，但只有一人报警，且报警时为时已晚。

这些年来，我多次描述这一令人震惊的案件，其他讲授类似课程的社会心理学家们也是如此，还有一些社会学家试图据此分析为什么目击者们会如此冷漠无情，竟然能眼睁睁地看着这样的犯罪行为发生，却无动于衷。

问题在于：标准版Kitty Genovese案件描述在某些关键细节上出了错。

Kitty的弟弟Bill Genovese，去年制作了一部名为《目击者》（The Witness）的纪录片。根据他在这部电影中所展示的实拍场景，并非所有旁观者都冷漠无情：一个目击者在窗口大声呵斥凶手，另一个目击者在Kitty离世时将其抱在怀中，也有其他目击者在此期间报了警。

那么，为什么五十多年来，社会学家们一直在不断复述这个故事的失实版本，并将其作为旁观者极端冷漠的典型案例？ 

暂且不论其他，这至少意味着，在不经意间，我们已经被“失实表述”混淆了视听。这种“失实表述”虽然部分真实，但已被歪曲，就像上述案件被报道歪曲了一样，因为报纸想激起人们愤慨、恐惧、憎恶等强烈的负面情绪。

△各大媒体对纪录片《见证者》的评价

作为一名人类情绪的研究者，我知道即使是最负面的感受对我们而言也不可或缺：愤怒能有效地警示在实现目标路上有阻力；恐惧提醒人们谨慎行事并有所准备；憎恶让我们对坏人坏事敬而远之。

然而，有时我们的朋友、家人，还有政客、广告主、各路专家会出于各自目的而操控我们的情感。愤怒、恐惧、憎恶这些情绪可以有效驱使我们去打开网页、购买商品、为政客投票。

我们每天都在经受着各种各样 “失实表述”的狂轰滥炸，它们的杀伤力不容小觑。当前正值美国的大选季，你可以毫不费力地找到种种这样的案例。

我说这些的目的，不是为了嘲讽说谎之人，也不是为了给歪曲事实者贴上“匹诺曹”的标签。我只是想让你们明白，选择任何一种立场都可能导致夸大、歪曲或者忽略一些重要的事实，从而助长愤怒、恐惧和憎恶的情绪。

如果我的上述说法成立，那么你们在此接受教育的一个重要内容就是：学习如何辨别和应对这些失实表述。

在此过程中，你们应该特别留心那些与你自己的想法高度一致的表述。如果你在政治、文化、宗教或经济议题上持有坚定的立场，乐于接受那些能证实你原有观点、妖魔化相反意见的论调，那就会像很多人一样，掉入认知陷阱。

△听演讲的学生

我们都强烈倾向于接受与我们原有观念相符的故事版本，忽略或者拒绝接受那些不相符的。

社交媒体、博客圈和政治活动正充斥着失实表述，为负能量煽风点火，既阻碍着理性调查，也阻碍着不同意见的充分交流，甚至还会妨碍我们对全球共同面临的挑战性问题达成共识。

你们现在意气风发，满怀希望地想理解这个世界，找准你在其中所处的位置，并弄明白如何为它的进步贡献你的力量。那么，当你对不同意见产生重大怀疑时，怎么去抵制“失实表述”的魅惑呢？

我对那些在你们这样的年轻学子，以及整个高等教育界颇有市场的“失实表述”高度警惕。我有满满一架子关于当代社会的书，它们试图让我相信：

顶尖名校的学生不过是优秀的绵羊

文科生毕业就等于失业

真正有想法有勇气的学生都辍学去创业了

没有主见的“千禧一代”需要父母出谋划策

大学教授的政治观点千篇一律

现在的学生都是柔弱的温室花朵

不放弃言论自由就不可能形成开放包容的校园文化

我们的高等学府是与现实隔绝的象牙塔，等等。

△耶鲁大学教授威廉·德雷谢维奇著《优秀的绵羊》，他认为美国精英教育培养出来的学生大都聪明有天分，但同时又充满焦虑、胆小怕事。

作为回应，我想说，你们在耶鲁所受的教育不仅会释放你的想象力，增进你的学识，推动你的职业生涯，更会提高你的领导力，让你在这个两极分化加剧的浮躁时代发挥更加积极的作用——而这种能力无疑相当重要。

特别值得一提的是，你们的老师和导师都非常出色。他们的生活经历和职业生涯有力地见证了训练有素地、理性审慎地追寻光明和真理是多么有价值。

我们的老师（无论是工程专业、经济学专业，还是英语专业、环境学专业），都秉承着同一价值观，那就是，任何简单粗暴、煽风点火、歪曲误导的表述都值得怀疑。

当然，没有人能完全摆脱偏见。但是，作为学者，我们力求审慎，对于所调查和最看重之事能有理有据地表达意见。如果学术界丧失这一理想准则，我们就会迷失；如果高等学府失去这一准则，整个世界都将迷失。

我可以提供一份长长的耶鲁教师名单，这些耶鲁人数十年如一日地在实验室、档案馆、图书馆和田野调查的现场，寻找证据，挑战已经被广为接受的观点、失实的表述，以及高度可疑的所谓常识。

以下是一些例子： 

△很多人认为我们的法律系统几乎完全建立在世俗传统之上，当代法律中的质询体系是对中世纪经典本质性的背离。但耶鲁中世纪历史学教授Anders Winroth反驳了这个“失实表述”，他提供了很多证据，证明当代法律其实根植于中世纪传统。

△过去，宇宙天体学的重要理论多建立在“地球是宇宙中独一无二的星球”这一假设之上。天文学教授Debra Fischer却发现银河系中有很多类似于太阳系的、行星围绕恒星而转的结构。

△医学研究者们多年来一直以为性别与疾病传播基本无关。耶鲁妇女健康研究中心主任Carolyn Mazure，一直在研究性别在大范围的生物体系中造成的重要差异，并将其运用到新的健康医疗实践中。

△大多数科班出身的古典经济学家将仔细计算成本和利益过程作为人类决策的模型。诺贝尔奖获得者Robert Shiller挑战了“个人和市场是理性的”这一观点，推动了人类行为理论的重大修正。

△当我还在读心理学研究生的时候，当时主流的说法是人类所学到的一切几乎都来源于经历。但是心理学教授Karen Wynn告诉我们，婴儿有令人惊讶的天赋， 5个月大的婴儿就能做初步的运算。西利曼学院的新院长、心理学教授Laurie Santos，则向我们展示了猴子也先天地具有憎恨、嫉妒、认知失调等复杂状态。

△最后我要提到研究非裔美国人和美国学的教授Hazel Carby。她的第一本著作《重构女性特质》（Reconstructing Womanhood）研究了19世纪美国黑人女作家是如何在白人主导的社会中，改变女性的家庭和文学形象的。Carby教授还在为另一本书所作的序中，有力地评说了对边缘人群失实和片面的描述：我们看到了不充足的证据是怎么重新组合，从而产生一种新的表述，看到了沉默是如何产生的……”

人们会很自然地建构起对自己有利的表述。但在面临压力时，“失实表述”就会控制公众的理智，操控舆论，煽动消极情绪，激化矛盾，我对此深感忧虑。特别是在我们这个时代，失实信息会在瞬间传播，成倍放大。由此，我们发现有时愤怒、恐惧或者憎恶会遮蔽我们的双眼，让我们无视世界的复杂性，放弃寻求对于重大议题的更深入的理解。

因此，耶鲁教育的重要内容是，让你成为一个更加审慎的批判性思考者——学习怎样正确地评估证据，考虑得更广更全面，从而得出你自己的结论。

尤其值得一提的是，耶鲁会教会你怎样以及为何要去了解那些与你持不同意见的人，它们将挑战你曾经深信不疑的想法。

它也会让你们明白，为什么我们需要超乎寻常的训练、勇气和终其一生的坚持，才能构筑起一个全新的基石，去解决我们这个时代最棘手的问题。

你已经来到了一个高度重视不同观点和深度反思的地方，这里鼓励观点的多样性和最大程度的言论自由。

我相信你会立刻发现耶鲁的最宝贵之处，那就是：师长、同学会激励你、启发你，帮助你作好最充足的准备，去成为这个世界极度需要的调查者、有远见之人，以及领导者。

△校长加入Stacy Phillips的乐队，司职贝斯手

只有完成上述使命，我们才能迎来一个更好的世界，抑或一个更包容、更振奋人心的耶鲁。而事实上，正是你们为我们带来了希望，你们是我们成为教育家的初衷，也是我们今天相聚于此的理由。

欢迎来到耶鲁！

以下为演讲英文全文：

Countering False Narratives

Speaker:

Peter Salovey, President of Yale University

Date:

Saturday, August 27, 2016

Event:

Freshman Address, Yale College Class of 2020

Good morning and welcome: to my colleagues here on stage, to the family members who have joined us today, and—especially—to the Yale College Class of 2020.

Twenty-twenty—a term that inevitably brings to mind perfect eyesight. And now that all of you are wearing 2020 as your class label in Yale College, I am confident your intuition and your mental acuity will develop here to an equivalent level of strength.The admissions office assures me that everything possible has been done to guarantee this outcome.

Nonetheless, I’d like to reflect—on your “first day of school”—about what might impede your insight and what might advance it in the course of your education here.

For many years, I taught introductory psychology to large numbers of freshmen. In the part of the course devoted to social psychology, I would ask my students to consider what we know about helping others in various kinds of social situations. Specifically, why is it that we offer assistance, or fail to offer assistance, in emergencies？

I would begin with the tragic and well known case of Kitty Genovese, a twenty-nine-year-old woman who lived in Kew Gardens, Queens, and was murdered there in 1964. Her case received enormous attention and commentary, and you have probably heard some version of her story. As reported in the New York Times, thirty-eight individuals watched the murder from their apartment windows, but only one called the police, and by then it was too late.[1]

Over the years, I have described this shocking incident many times. So have other social psychologists teaching similar courses, and so did the social scientists who sought to explain how witnesses could exhibit such callous indifference to a horrific crime taking place before their eyes.

Here’s the trouble: the standard account of the Kitty Genovese case is wrong in some of its crucial details.

Kitty’s brother, Bill Genovese, produced a film last year called The Witness. In it, he documents that some bystanders were not indifferent: one witness shouted out the window at the attacker, another witness held Kitty in her arms as she died, and several called the police during the attack.

So what does it mean that social scientists have been retelling an incorrect version of this story for over fifty years as a paradigmatic example of extreme bystander indifference? Well, among other things, it means that inadvertently we have been perpetuating what could rightly be called a false narrative—a version of events that, while partly true, had been shaped, in this case by a newspaper report, to elicit strong negative emotions like anger, fear, or disgust.

As an investigator of human emotions, I know that even the most negative feelings can be important to our survival. Anger effectively signals that a goal is being blocked. Fear motivates caution and preparation. Disgust moves us away from things that can make us ill. However, sometimes our friends, family members, politicians, advertisers, pundits, and others look to manipulate our emotions for their own purposes. Anger, fear, and disgust can be highly effective ways to drive eyeballs to websites, consumers to products, or voters to the polls.

My sense is that we are bombarded daily by false narratives of various kinds, and that they are doing a great deal of damage. In a national election season, you do not need to look very hard to find them.

It is not my purpose today to mock the biggest “whoppers” or award “Pinocchios” for the biggest distortions. Rather, I am only hoping to persuade you that advocates on any side of a question can be tempted to exaggerate or distort or neglect crucial facts in ways that serve primarily to fuel your anger, fear, or disgust.

If I am correct, then an important aspect of your education here will be learning how to recognize and address these kinds of accounts. In the course of that, you should pay especially close attention to the narratives that seem to align best with your own beliefs. To the extent you hold strong political or cultural or religious or economic beliefs, you will simply be like all the rest of us if you gravitate toward explanations that seem to provide confirmation for those beliefs or to demonize those who hold different ones. All of us are strongly predisposed to accept accounts that align with the opinions we already hold, and to ignore or dismiss those that do not. Social media, the blogosphere, and the political process are increasingly drenched with such narratives, inflaming our negative emotions and presenting real barriers to reasoned investigation, productive exchanges between differing views, and the search for common ground on the most challenging problems facing our global societies.

So, you are now embarking on an ambitious and hopeful effort to understand the world, your place in it, and what you can contribute to forward progress. How can you address the seductive power of false narratives, especially in a time when grave mistrust on many sides seems to be fueling ever more of them？

It will not surprise you that I am highly aware of false narratives circulating about students like yourselves and higher education in general. I have a thick shelf of contemporary books assuring me that students at elite universities are merely excellent sheep, that a liberal arts degree is a ticket to unemployment, that truly inspired and courageous learners drop out of college to found tech companies, that millennials cannot make decisions without consulting their parents, that college professors have uniform political views, that students these days are fragile hothouse flowers, that it is not possible to achieve an inclusive campus culture without giving up on free speech, and that our colleges and universities are cut off from reality.

In response, I want to claim that your Yale education will not only enlarge your imagination, advance your knowledge, and propel your career, but also that it will be absolutely critical to your capacity for playing a positive, leadership role in these increasingly polarized and fractious times. In particular, you are about to be taught by outstanding teachers and mentors, whose lives and careers constitute a powerful witness for the value of a disciplined, reasoned, and careful search for light and truth.

What unites our faculty (from engineering to economics to English to environmental studies) is a stubborn skepticism about narratives that oversimplify issues, inflame the emotions, or misdirect the mind. No one is free of biases, of course, but as a community of scholars we subscribe to the ideal of judicious, searching inquiry in the service of reasoned discourse about the matters we investigate and care about the most. We would be lost as academics without this ideal, and our global societies would be lost if universities stopped being places defined by this ideal.

I could supply you with a long list of the Yale faculty who have spent decades of their lives in laboratories, archives, libraries, and field settings collecting evidence to challenge some received notion, some distorted narrative, or some common wisdom that turned out to be highly questionable. Here are some examples:

Many people assume that our legal system was built almost entirely on a secular tradition. But Yale’s professor of medieval history, Anders Winroth, counters the false narrative that contemporary legal reasoning is a radical departure from medieval canon law by showing that in many ways it is rooted in it.

Important cosmologies of the past depended on the assumption that the planet Earth is unique in the universe. Astronomy professor Debra Fischer has discovered many “worlds” (called exoplanets) orbiting around “suns” in solar systems spread throughout our galaxy.

Medical researchers assumed for many years that gender has little to do with the prevalence and course of most illnesses, and that findings from studies with men automatically generalize to women. Carolyn Mazure, the director of the Women’s Health Research Center at Yale, has been investigating critical differences that gender makes in a wide range of biological systems and translates those findings into new health practices.

Most classically trained economists have modeled human decisions as the result of careful calculations of costs and benefits. Nobel Prize winner Robert Shiller has emerged at the forefront of those who challenge the idea of rational individuals and markets, forcing major revisions to the theory of human behavior on which his field is based.

When I was a graduate student in psychology, the dominant narrative held that humans learn virtually everything from experience. But psychology professor Karen Wynn has been teaching us that human infants have surprising innate capacities. Five-month olds appear able to make rudimentary arithmetic calculations. And psychology professor Laurie Santos, the new head of Silliman College, has been showing us that monkeys, too, seem pre-wired for such complex states as resentment, envy, and cognitive dissonance.

I will close my list of examples by referencing professor of African American and American studies Hazel Carby. Her first book, Reconstructing Womanhood, was an exceptional exploration of the ways in which 19th century black women writers in America confronted and transformed the domestic and literary ideals of womanhood in white society. Professor Carby wrote a telling remark in her foreword to a book called Silencing the Past, highlighting the power of challenging false or incomplete narratives about the marginalized: “We learn how scanty evidence can be repositioned to generate new narratives, how silences can be made to speak for themselves. . .”[2]

People naturally construct narratives to make sense of their world. I have been concerned to point out that in times of great stress, false narratives may dominate the public mind and public discourse, inflaming negative emotions and fanning discord. In our times especially, a wide array of instantaneous transmissions rapidly amplify such narratives. As a result, we sometimes find that anger, fear, or disgust can blind us to the complexity of the world and the responsibility to seek deeper understandings of important issues.

One point of your Yale education, then, is for you to become a more careful and critical thinker—to learn the difficult, painstaking skills you will need in order to evaluate evidence, to deliberate more broadly and more carefully, and to arrive at your own conclusions.More particularly, Yale is a place for you to learn how and why to gravitate toward people who view things differently than you do, who will test your most strongly held assumptions. It is also a place to learn why it takes extraordinary discipline, courage, and persistence—often over a lifetime—to construct new foundations for tackling the most intractable and challenging questions of our time. You have come to a place where civil disagreements and deep rethinking are the heart and soul of the enterprise, where we prize exceptional diversity of views alongside the greatest possible freedom of expression.

So I trust that you will begin immediately to seek out what is best about this place: the faculty and staff and peers who will both inspire you and prepare you to become the investigators, visionaries, and leaders the world so sorely needs.

None of us here can hope for a better world, or even for a more inclusive and exhilarating learning community at Yale, unless we succeed at this mission. You are in fact what gives us hope. You are why we became educators. You are why we are here.

Welcome to Yale！

[1] Gansberg, M. 37 Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call the Police. New York Times (1964, March 27).

[2] Carby, H.V. (2015). Foreword to M.-R. Trouillot, Silencing the past:  Power and the production of history (originally published 1995). Boston:  Beacon Press. p. xiii.

（本文选自微信公众号“外滩教育”）

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