脑电波之父:汉斯·贝格尔
Around 1900, a German farmer made an extraordinary claim: he had taught a horse basic arithmetic, and even to read and spell! Indeed, in public demonstrations, the horse, called Clever Hans, was able to answer all of its owner’s questions correctly, by a sequence of taps of its hooves.
A轮1900年,德国农民做出了非凡的要求 :他教过马基本的算术,甚至阅读和拼写! 确实,在公开示威中,这匹名为“聪明汉斯”(Clever Hans)的马能够轻敲蹄子,就能正确回答主人的所有问题。
Oskar Pfungst, a psychologist of the time at the University of Berlin, did not quite believe the animal really possessed such human-like capabilities and designed a set of experiments to prove the farmer’s claim wrong. In 1907 he published his famous report on the matter, making a surprising observation: Clever Hans would only give the correct answer if the answer was known by the experimenter asking the question!
柏林大学当时的心理学家奥斯卡·普丰格斯特(Oskar Pfungst)不太相信这种动物确实具有像人类一样的能力,并设计了一系列实验来证明农民的说法是错误的。 1907年,他发表了有关该问题的著名报告 ,做出了令人惊讶的观察:聪明的汉斯只会在问问题的实验者知道答案的情况下给出正确答案!
The horse had not actually learned to solve the question by calculating or reading, but rather it recognized subtle cues in the experimenter’s body language to figure out what answer was expected of it.
这匹马实际上并没有学会通过计算或阅读来解决问题,而是认识到了实验者肢体语言中的细微线索,以期得出对它的期望。
To this day, the phenomenon of (human or animal) test subjects’ actions in psychological studies being affected by the experimenter’s expectations is known as “Clever Hans phenomenon”. Typically, special care is taken to prevent the subjects from giving the right answer without solving the real task.