Economist 英汉双语阅读“经济学人”杂志
2010年8月19日
正文:
Corporate psychology
How to tell when your boss is lying
It's not just that his lips are moving
Aug 19th 2010
“ASSHOLE!” That was what Jeff Skilling, the boss of Enron, called an investor who challenged his rosy account of his firm’s financial health. Other bosses usually give less obvious clues that they are lying. Happily, a new study reveals what those clues are.
David Larcker and Anastasia Zakolyukina of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business analysed the transcripts of nearly 30,000 conference calls by American chief executives and chief financial officers between 2003 and 2007. They noted each boss’s choice o f words, and how he delivered them. They drew on psychological studies that show how people speak differently when they are fibbing, testing whether these “tells” were more common during calls to discuss profits that were later “materially restated”, as th e euphemism goes. They published their findings in a paper called “Detecting Deceptive Discussions in Conference Calls”.
Deceptive bosses, it transpires, tend to make more references to general knowledge (“as you know…”), and refer less to shareholder valu e (perhaps to minimise the risk of a lawsuit, the authors hypothesise). They also use fewer “non-extreme positive emotion words”. That is, instead of describing something as “good”, they call it “fantastic”. The aim is to “sound more persuasive” while talk ing horsefeathers.
When they are lying, bosses avoid the word “I”, opting instead for the third person. They use fewer “hesitation words”, such as “um” and “er”, suggesting that they may have been coached in their deception. As with Mr Skilling’s “asshole”, more frequent use of swear words indicates deception. These results were significant, and arguably would have been even stronger had the authors been able to distinguish between executives who knowingly misled and those who did so unwittingly. They had to assume that every restatement was the result of deliberate deception; but the psychological traits they tested for would only appear in a person who knew he was lying.
This study should help investors glean valuable new insights from conference calls. Alas, this benefit may diminish over time. The real winners will be public-relations firms, which now know to coach the boss to hesitate more, swear less and avoid excessive expressions of positive emotion. Expect “fantastic” results to become a thing of the past.
Business
Chinese Translation 中文翻译
公司心理学
如何看出老板在撒谎
可不只是看他动动嘴唇那么简单
Aug 19th 2010
“狗屁！”Enron公司老板Jeff Skilling对一名投资者叫道，这位投资者对老板有关其公司财务健康状况的美好描述提出了质疑。
别的老板撒谎时，通常不会给人很多明显线索。
幸运的是，一项新的研究告诉我们这些明显和不明显的线索都是什么。
斯坦福商学院研究生院的David Larcker和Anastasia Zakolyukina分析了2003年至2007年间美
国首席执行官和首席财务官的近30,000份电话会议纪录，记录每位老板的措辞及说话方式。
通过
测试老板在电话中讨论盈利状况时，“具体的，等随后再说”这类委婉语“表达”模式是否更为常见，结合心理学研究，他们想要揭示，在撒些无伤大雅的小谎时，人们的说话方式有何不同。
该项
研究成果在论文“找出电话会议中的欺骗”中发布。
该论文透露，欺骗性的老板总是更多的提及大家都知道的（“你知道……”），较少提及股东的价
值（也许是要把法律诉讼的风险降到最低，据作者揣测）。
他们还几乎不使用“非极端积极情感词汇”，即，不说“好”，而说“棒极了”，这样做的目的，是要让他们的胡说八道“听起来会更
有说服力”。
撒谎时，老板们会避免使用“我”这个词，相反，他们会使用第三人称。
他们较少使用像“嗯”、“哦”之类的“踌躇不决词汇”，这表明他们的行骗已经训练有素。
像Skilling先生的“狗屁”
一样，高频度使用骂人词汇也表明是在欺骗。
这些发现结果很有意义，要是作者能够区分故意为之
的欺诈老板与那些笨而不自知的欺诈老板的话，就会更有意义。
两位作者只能推断，所有的“事后
再说”都是在故意欺骗；但是，他们所进行的测试中，符合欺骗的心理学特征的老板中，只有一人
知道自己在欺骗。
该研究有助于帮助投资者从电话会议中找出有价值的新思路。
哎呀，这个好处会随着时间的推移而
消失。
真正的赢家会是公共关系公司，他们现在就知道了该训练老板说话时要经常表现得犹豫不决、要少骂人、要避免积极情感的过度表达等。
期望该研究那些“棒极了”的好处能够很快成为过去时。
译者：A.Little.Boat。