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Stand at the bottom of a big hill and you can exhaust yourself just thinking about climbing it. But a new study suggests it’s not as bad as it looks. Because people tend to overestimate the steepness of slopes, and not because we’re lazy.

站在大山腳下，光想著爬上去就讓你累得夠嗆了。但一項新研究顯示，事情并沒有你想象中那么難，因為人們傾向于高估邊坡陡度——但這并不是因為大家生性懶惰。

Psychologists have long assumed that our misperception of slope was biased by fatigue or even fear of falling. If we see going up or down a hill as difficult, our perception could be influenced by our point of view.

心理學家一直假定我們對山坡的錯誤認知受到了身體的疲勞，或者甚至是受到了對掉下山的恐懼的影響。假如我們將登山和下山看做一件難事的話，自身的觀點就會影響我們對山坡的看法。

But researchers at Ohio State University have found it isn’t so. The scientists asked 200 passersby to estimate the angle of a set of stairs, and another 200 to do the same for an escalator—which, of course, requires no effort to ascend. In each case, half the subjects looked from the bottom and half from the top.

但俄亥俄州的研究人員發(fā)現(xiàn)事實并不是這樣的。科學家詢問了200個行人，讓他們評估樓梯的坡度，然后又找了另外200人去評估自動扶梯的坡度——人們總不用攀登自動扶梯了吧。每一次實驗都有一半人從下往上看，另一半人從上往下看。

The results: viewers consistently overestimated the slant of each slope by about 20 degrees. The work appears in the journal Psychological Science.

結果就是：觀察者總是高估了大概20度的坡度。這項研究刊登在《心理科學》雜志上。

The researchers are not sure what drives this angular disparity. Perhaps it’s because our visual system evolved to be overly sensitive to even slight departures from the horizontal, to help keep us upright. Because ‘not falling down’ is the first step to making it up that hill.

研究人員并不確定是什么因素導致了坡度的出入。可能是由于視覺系統(tǒng)進化，使得我們對些微高于水平面的物體過度敏感，以此幫助我們挺直腰桿。因為“不掉下山”是成功登山的第一步呀。

—Karen Hopkin

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