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  3. From The Tipping Point to Nudge, the rise of pop-social science has been a noticeable feature of the past decade in publishing.

From The Tipping Point to Nudge, the rise of pop-social science has been a noticeable feature of the past decade in publishing.

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问题     From The Tipping Point to Nudge, the rise of pop-social science has been a noticeable feature of the past decade in publishing. Not everyone is impressed. A professor of education who is an expert in policy evaluation lamented the fact that politicians tend to get their facts from popular social science books containing inaccuracies.
    I think the professor was right to worry about ministerial exposure to authors such as Malcolm Glad-well and Dan Ariely and even Tim Harford— but not for quite the right reasons. The problem is not that such authors are inaccurate. Gladwell has plenty of critics, but I find him a careful reporter. And I am told Tim Harford is all but infallible.
    Yet infallibility is not enough. It’s perfectly possible for an author to do nothing but weave together credible, peer-reviewed research and yet produce a highly partial view of reality. Different pieces of research invariably point in different directions. Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational is full of examples of irrational behaviour. My own Logic of Life is full of examples of rational behaviour.
    If Ariely describes a rainy day and I describe a sunny one, we are not really contradicting each other. We each offer our spin, but it’s really about whether most people expect sunshine or rain: Dan says that it’s rainier than we tend to think, while I say the sun shines more often than anyone would credit. A serious review of this metaphorical evidence would count up the rainy days and the sunny ones.
    For real policy questions, such reviews exist. They are called systemic reviews. They should be the first port of call for anyone wanting to understand what works. But they are not exactly bestsellers in airport bookshops.
    Quite apart from the fact that nobody wants to read all the evidence, there is a deep problem with the way evidence is selected throughout academia. Even a studiously impartial literature review will be biased towards published results. Many findings are never published because they just aren’t very intriguing. Alas, boring or disappointing evidence is still evidence. It is dangerous to discard it.
    The systemic review tries to track down unpublished research as well as what makes it into the journals. A less careful review will often be biased towards results that are interesting. A peer-reviewed article presents a single result, while a popular social-science book will highlight a series of results that tell a tale. The final selection mechanism is the reader, who will half remember some findings and forget the rest.
    Those of us who tell ourselves we are curious about the world are actually swimming in "evidence" that has been filtered again and again in favour of interestingness. It’s a heady and perhaps toxic drink, but we shouldn’t blame popularisers alone for our choice to dive in.
The text intends to tell information users that it’s essential to______,
选项 A、remain sober-minded before intriguing research
B、produce a correct view of reality from contradictory researches
C、compromise between interestingness and objectiveness
D、extract concrete facts from pop social science
答案A
解析 本文通过前四段的分析指出：流行社会科学作品往往为带有偏见性的观点，故不能作为制定政策的依据。第五段指出，政策制定者真正需要的是客观全面的系统性评估。但目前的出版物中不大可能提供这种评述。第六段分析指出原因：当前出版体制倾向于以“趣味性”为重要标尺决定研究结果能否发表：引人人胜的研究容易发表，缺乏趣味或令人失望的研究(即便有价值也)往往被拒绝。第七、八段则向读者(信息使用者)提出建议：摆在我们面前的证据已经过“趣味性”这个过滤器的无数遍筛选(很多有价值的证据仅仅因为无趣而早已被舍弃)。这会使我们头脑不清、甚至中毒(无法全面衡量现实，从而可能制定出错误的计划、方案等)，但我们对此不应该只是责备那些传播者(而应该自己保持清醒的头脑)。故[A]选项正确。
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