你走进我的世界没想到:时光缘何似放慢脚步

我们都知道，快乐的时光是短暂的。在前一篇博文里，我已指明，当我们全身心投入某事之时，时光便如流水般飞逝，即使我们回头体味同一事物，发觉耗时弥久。慢的一面，显然是那些无聊的事物，它们似乎拽拉着时间。一个小时的历史讲座似乎可以比它讲的整个历史时期还要冗长。

An interesting paper in the October 2011 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin by Edward O'Brien, Phyllis Anastasio and Brad Bushman, explores the role of your sense of entitlement on the perception of the passage of time.

爱德华-奥布莱恩、菲利斯-阿纳斯塔西奥和布拉德-布什曼在《人格和社会心理学》2011年10月期的杂志上发表了一篇有趣的论文，它探索了人的权利资格意识在感知时光流逝中的作用。

The basic idea is straightforward. At any given time, everyone feels some sense of entitlement. Standing on the line to check out at a big box retailer, you might feel particularly entitled to better service. So, a 10-minute wait for a slow cashier may feel like an hour. On the other hand, if you were sitting in a waiting room at the White House before having a chance to meet the president, you might consider yourself lucky to be there. In that case, a 10-minute wait might not feel so long. 

文章的基本思路很简单。在任何给定时间点，每个人都有权利资格的意识。当站在一部大贩售机面前等待付款时，你尤其会感到有资格获得更好的服务。所以，在碰到慢吞吞的收银员之时，十分钟的等待便宛如一个小时的煎熬。另外，如果你已获得与总统见面的机会，那么你将认为自己在白宫候客室的等待是一种运气。如果是那样，10分钟的等待便显得不那么长了。

In one study, the authors just looked at the correlation between people's general sense of entitlement and their perception of time. It turns out that there is a difference between people in how entitled they feel in general. Some people generally feel more like they deserve to get things from the world than other people. 

在一份研究中，研究人员仅仅观察了人们大体权利资格意识与其时间感知之间的关系。结果表明，人们对于所获权利资格的感知在大体上是不同的。有些人大体上就认为自己应该比其他人获得的更多。

The authors gave people a number of questionnaires including one that measured the sense of entitlement. Then they had people do either a boring task (copying a matrix of letters) or a less boring task (using that same matrix of letters to find people's names). People did this task for exactly 10 minutes, and then they were asked how long the task took. (To make the time judgment harder, there were no clocks in the room, and people had been asked to remove their watches before starting the study.) 

研究人员给受试者提供了一些调查问卷，其中有一份就是衡量权利资格意识的。然后，他们要么让受试者做一种单调无趣的任务(抄写一个字母矩阵)，要么便是另一种不那么无趣的任务(用同样的字母矩阵来找出人名)。受试者整整做了10分钟这样的任务，然后被问及做这件任务所用的时间。(为使时间判断更加严格，房间中没有钟表，受试者也被要求于实验前脱下手表。)

When people did the relatively fun task, there was no relationship between the amount of time people felt they spent doing the task and their general sense of entitlement. In contrast, when people did the boring task, the more people generally feel entitled, the longer they felt they spent on the task. 

当人们在做一些相对有趣的任务之时，人的大体权利资格意识与其对时间消耗的感知没有关系。相反，当在做一些单调无趣的任务时，人们通常会更多的意识到自身的权利资格，也会觉得用在任务上的时间会更多。

Two other studies actually manipulated people's sense of entitlement. For example, in one study, college students did a long (and rather boring) questionnaire in which they answered mundane questions about themselves (like how often do you eat fast food?). To influence the sense of entitlement, one group was told that they were answering the questions because the university wanted to know more about each individual student. A second group was told that the university wanted to know more about the student body in general. After doing the questionnaire, participants judged how long it took to complete and also rated how much they thought the survey was a waste of their time.

其他的2个研究报告实际上操控了人们的权力资格意识。比如，在一个研究中，大学生完成了一份冗长(而且无趣)的问卷，问卷的问题都是些稀松平常的个人问题(比如，你多久吃一次快餐？)。为了影响权力资格意识，一组学生被告知，他们做此问卷的原因在于学校想更多的了解每一个学生。第二组被告知学校只是想大体了解下学生群体。完成问卷后，受试者估计了完成问卷所用的时间，同时，还对问卷浪费时间的程度作出了评级。

Now, you might think that being asked questions about yourself would be more interesting than answering questions about students in general. So, it could easily be the case that the survey would seem shorter when you are more engaged in the task. In fact, people felt the survey took more time when they were told it was about them in particular than when it was about students in general. So, the sense of entitlement increased people's judgments of the time the survey took to complete. Other analyses of the data show that this difference reflected that people who thought the survey was about them in particular felt the task was a bigger waste of their time than those who thought it was about students in general.

现在，你可能会认为，回答关于自身的问题要比回答群体的问题有趣。所以，很容易你便会得出这样的结论，当你更认真地完成它时，问卷似乎会显得短一些。实际上，当受试者被告知问卷是关于自身之时，比起那些回答大体问题的学生，他们感到完成问卷花费的时间更长。因此，权利资格的意识增加了受试者对于完成问卷所需时间的判断。此资料的其他分析显示，这种差异反映出了这样的结果，比起认为问卷是大体了解的受试者，那些认为问卷是关乎自身的学生感觉这样的问卷更加浪费时间。

What does all this mean?

这说明了什么？

Time is one of our most precious resources. The greater your sense of entitlement, the more that you want to avoid wasting resources. As a result, the more entitled you feel, the more pain you experience when your time is wasted. Even though nobody enjoys frustration, this mechanism is a good one to have. If we did not experience frustration when our time was being wasted, we might persist doing things that do not deserve our effort.

时间是我们最珍贵的资源。你的权力资格意识愈强烈，你便愈加避免浪费时光。其结果便是，你越感到自己有资格，在浪费时光时，你所经历的痛楚便越多。即便没有人喜欢沮丧感，拥有这种机制也是有益的。假如，在浪费光阴时我们不觉沮丧，那么，我们便可能继续坚持做一些不值得付出努力的事情了。