泰迪熊在办公室的遭遇

英国《金融时报》专栏作家 露西•凯拉韦
最近，我对着四十几名同僚外加两只泰迪熊和一只独眼兔子玩具做了一场报告。主题是：谁会阅读英国《金融时报》？我的论点是：我们的读者比你所能想象的更加千奇百怪。
在卡扎菲上校(Colonel Gaddafi)在的黎波里的老巢被攻破后，我们知道了一点：卡扎菲上校是英国《金融时报》旗下周刊《How to Spend It》的忠实读者。那么，英国《金融时报》这份日报本身有哪些读者呢？
从我本人收到过的电子邮件来判断，经常阅读英国《金融时报》的有：马来西亚一名九岁的小姑娘；荷兰的一位年轻男子，此人最近写信要我帮他的狗取名字；住在英国养老院的一位老艺术家，他送给了我一幅令人不安的亲笔画作，画的是一个戴帽子的女人，风格与毕加索(Picasso)相似。
在我讲话时，同事们都有礼貌地聆听。这可能是因为他们对我所讲的内容感兴趣，也可能是因为摆在他们中间的填充玩具发挥出了效果。我亲手把这些可爱的动物玩具摆在了听众席上，因为我想验证一下哈佛大学一位伦理学专家的研究结果。此人发现，当房间里摆放着泰迪熊时，人们的举止会变得更加文雅。身边有一只泰迪熊，明显会让成年人更倾向于“做出亲社会行为”。所谓“亲社会行为”，我想就是诚实、有礼貌的意思吧。
从表面上来看，这番话听上去并不是十分有道理。一个成年人走到哪里都带着泰迪熊的例子，我只能想到一个，那就是《故园风雨后》(Brideshead Revisited)中的塞巴斯蒂安•弗莱特勋爵(Lord Sebastian Flyte)。那只泰迪熊——阿洛伊修斯(Aloysius)——显然没有在它的主人身上激起丝毫的亲社会行为，塞巴斯蒂安最终酗酒成性，流落于摩洛哥北部城市费斯(Fez)。不过他只是伊夫林•沃(Evelyn Waugh)虚构的一个人物，所以这个例子也许不能令人信服。
开展这项研究的斯瑞达莉•德赛(Sreedhari Desai)是一位学者，她认为，玩具会让我们联想到孩子和纯洁的天性，因而会让我们的举止更加符合道德规范。她表示，即使是一盒蜡笔，也会让我们弄虚作假的可能性降低20%。在会议室里摆满我们小时候玩的那些玩具，或许在企业伦理方面起到奇妙的效果。如果她说的没错，那么，职场生活中的背景音乐不应该再是循环播放的乏味音乐，而应该是《巴士上的轮子》(The Wheels on the Bus)或者《头、肩膀、膝盖和脚趾》(Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes)之类的童谣。
也许这并不是一派胡言。人们会把驴和赛马拴在一起，好让马儿安静下来。而且，当身边有婴儿时，我们会收起不雅的举止，这是千真万确的。我注意到，当有同事带着婴儿来上班时，其他人不会像平常那样骂骂咧咧，而是会围着孩子转，整个人显得充满柔情，老是发出依依呀呀的声音。
不过，把一个真正的婴儿带到办公室充作伦理辅助工具，有着各种各样的缺点。婴儿会哭闹，让人分心，而且让他们终日出席冗长的会议也不是特别合适。
相比之下，泰迪熊的表现一贯完美无缺，富有忍耐力，足可作为其他人学习的榜样。
不过，在我讲话期间，泰迪熊的有益影响并不是决定性的证据，因为大家平常在听人讲话时通常都很有礼貌。所以，最近我又拿泰迪熊做了一次更加严格的实验：我把这三只柔软的玩具拿到了英国《金融时报》的新闻晨会上。这往往是一个充斥着雄性激素、火药味十足的场合，二十多名铁面记者你来我往，唇枪舌战，所以我很想看看泰迪熊能否让气氛缓和一些。
哎，可惜结果并不乐观。记者们走进会议室时，都狐疑地看了看这些泰迪熊，然后情愿坐得离主编近一点，也不肯挨着可爱的泰迪熊。
会议一如既往地进行，唯一的岔子是，一位同事担心熊里面藏着摄像头，还想把保安叫过来。
把泰迪熊从会议室里拿回来后，我把它们搁在了我的桌子上。有位同事经过时，担心地看了看我，问我：家里一切都好吗？还有位同事说，那只独眼玩意儿让他毛骨悚然。
所以说，对记者们来说，泰迪熊似乎并不具有如上所说的伦理效应。不过，我倒是注意到，在工作场所，玩具能有产生一种效果。我知道有个人，他的桌子上有一部小孩玩的翻斗车，他在讲电话时喜欢摆弄它。但要是有人走过来玩他的翻斗车，他就会开始坐立不安。
玩具或许确实能阻止我们做出不道德的行为，因为它们会让我们联想到婴儿。不过，我想到了一个对立的论题，哈佛的其他什么人也许可以花上几年研究研究：办公室里的玩具不会让我们联想起婴儿，而是会让我们做出婴儿一样的举动。
译者/何黎
Do teddies have a place in the boardroom?
By Lucy Kellaway
Last week I gave a talk to an audience of four dozen colleagues plus two teddy bears and a rabbit with one eye. The subject was: Who reads the Financial Times? And my thesis was that our readers are odder than you’d think.
We now know, following the storming of his compound in Tripoli, that Colonel Gaddafi was a keen reader of the FT’s How to Spend It supplement. But what about the daily paper?
Judging by my own archive of e-mails, the FT is regularly read by a nine-year-old girl in Malaysia, a young man from the Netherlands who recently wrote in asking me to help him name his dog and an elderly artist living in sheltered accommodation in the UK who sent me a troubling drawing he’d done in the style of Picasso of a woman in a hat.
As I talked, my colleagues listened politely. This may have been because they were interested in what I was saying. Or it may have been because of the stuffed toys in the audience. I had planted these cuddly animals there myself in response to some research from an expert in ethics at Harvard University who has found that people behave better when teddy bears are in the room. The presence of a bear apparently makes adults more inclined to “engage in pro-social behaviours” – which I think means being honest and polite.
On the face of it this doesn’t sound terribly plausible. The only example I can think of where a grown-up goes around with a teddy bear is Lord Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited. His bear, Aloysius, didn’t obviously encourage pro-social behaviours at all: its owner disappears into dissolution and alcoholism in Fez. But then, as Lord Flyte was a person invented by Evelyn Waugh, this example may not be conclusive.
Sreedhari Desai, the academic who carried out the research, argues that toys make us more ethical because we associate them with children and with purity. Even a packet of crayons, she says, can make us 20 per cent less likely to cheat. To fill boardrooms with the toys of our infancy could work wonders for corporate ethics. If she is right, the soundtrack to office life should no longer be bland piped music, but “The Wheels on the Bus” or “Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes”.
Maybe this isn’t entirely nutty. They keep donkeys with racehorses to calm them down. And it’s certainly true that the presence of real live infants takes an ugly edge off our behaviour. I’ve noticed that when colleagues turn up to work with their babies people don’t swear so much but gather around the child, look sentimental and say “ahhhh” a lot.
But bringing a live baby into work as an ethical aid has various drawbacks. Babies make a noise and are distracting, and it’s not terribly nice for them having to sit through long meetings all day.
Teddy bears, on the other hand, always behave impeccably, have a high boredom threshold and set an excellent standard for others to follow.
However, their helpful influence during my speech was not decisive, as people tend to listen quite politely anyway. So last week I gave the teddies a second, tougher test and planted my three soft toys in the FT’s morning news conference. This can be a harsh, testosterone-fuelled occasion, with two dozen ruthless journalists playing politics, and so I was keen to see if the teddies would soften things up a bit.
Alas the results were not so promising. Journalists arriving in the conference room glanced at the bears with suspicion, preferring instead to take the seats near the editor rather than sit next to a cuddly teddy bear.
Conference progressed as usual, the only hitch being when one person feared that the bears might be hiding a camera and considered calling security.
Recovering the bears from the meeting room, I positioned them around my desk. One colleague passing by glanced at me with concern and asked if everything was all right at home. Another said the one-eyed creature was giving him the creeps.
So with journalists, teddies don’t seem to have the required ethical effect. However, I have noticed toys at work having another effect. I know one man who has a child’s dumper truck on his desk, which he loves to play with when on the phone. But if someone else comes along and plays with the truck he starts to get upset.
Toys may conceivably deter us from acting unethically as they make us think of infants. But I can think of a rival thesis that someone else at Harvard might spend a few years working on: toys in the office don’t make us think of babies, they make us act like them.