对于当代的寂寞心灵来说，通过手机找到爱情或仅仅是性的几率有多大呢？统计数据不容乐观：虽然每天仅仅是Tinder一个应用就有2600万对配对，但始于网络的真挚情感关系只有5%。
约会应用给空虚的我们带来了什么？
作者：Mia Levitin
译者：尹子梦
校对：徐唱
编辑：徐唱
Theone thing dating apps will give you for sure? Addiction
约会应用必将给你带来什么？上瘾
本文选自
NewStatesman
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A Chelsea-based
physiotherapist
I know saw a young woman complaining of persistent pain in her index finger. Puzzled, he tried to identify what could possibly be straining it. The patient finally admitted, slightly
sheepishly
, to using Tinder. A lot.The prescription? Switch hands. That will be £200 pounds please... Tinder finger treated, she’s back online for Valentine’s. But just how likely are modern-day lonely hearts to find the love, or even the sex, they seek on their smartphones?
我认识一位在切尔西工作的
理疗师
，他曾碰到过一个抱怨食指持续疼痛的年轻女性。他很困惑，试图找到食指损伤的可能原因。最终，这位病人有点
不好意思地
承认，她是Tinder用户，且使用频率非常高。那有什么治疗方法呢？双手轮换使用手机。而这简单的处方需要200英镑的诊费……在治疗手指后，这位病人为了情人节再次使用起Tinder。对于当代的寂寞心灵来说，通过手机找到爱情或仅仅是性的几率有多大呢？
sheepishly
/
ˈʃiːpɪʃ
/ adv.
slightly uncomfortable or embarrassed because you know that you have done something 怯懦地;羞怯地
The stats are
grim
: despite 26 million matches made each day on Tinder alone, Pew data reveal that only five per cent of committed relationships began online. For the vast majority of users, the game itself proves to be more
arousing
than the other players: fewer than 10 per cent of matches are
consummated
with even a half-assed “hey”, as users opt to “keep playing” instead of messaging the matches already made.Nearly half of millennials surveyed admitted to using dating apps as “ego-boosting procrastination” rather than to meet people. Perhaps no surprise, then, that – far from the image of a free-love fest at the fingertips propagated by the popular press – singles are having less sex than their counterparts a generation ago, a phenomenon the study’s author, San Diego State University psychology professor Jean Twenge, attributes to the apps.
统计数据
不容乐观
：虽然每天仅仅是Tinder一个应用就有2600万对配对，但皮尤的数据显示，始于网络的真挚情感关系只有5%。对绝大多数用户来说，配对的游戏过程比配到的用户更
有吸引力
：不到10%的配对甚至仅在一句不走心的“嗨”后就
结束
了，因为用户会选择“继续配对”，而非与已配对的另一方发信息。在受访的千禧一代用户中，有将近一半人承认约会应用对于他们不过是一种获得自我满足并逃避现实的拖延方式，而非一个真正结识他人的途径。这么说来，圣地亚哥州立大学心理学教授让·特温格的研究结果或许就不那么令人意外了：她发现，现今单身者的性生活比上一代同龄人少。这与大众传媒宣传的“指尖自由恋爱”不同。特温格教授将这一现象归因于约会应用。
grim
/
ɡrɪm
/ adj. making you feel worried or unhappy; looking or sounding very serious 讨厌的, 糟糕的
consummate
/kənˈsʌmət/ v. to make something complete, especially an agreement 使结束, 使完美
What is it about caressing a touchscreen that has become more compelling than touching another human being? Dating apps have been shown to be
pathologically addictive
: according to Tinder– by far the market leader – the average user logs in 11 times per day, spending about 77 minutes daily in pursuit of the neurochemical cocktail dished out each time there’s a match. The ding lights up the same pleasure centres in the brain activated by eating chocolate, viewing erotic imagery, or snorting cocaine.
为什么比起触摸另一个人，人们更喜欢爱抚屏幕？约会应用已证明会使人
病态上瘾
：据目前此类应用的市场领导者Tinder统计，用户平均每天登陆11次、花费77分钟以寻求成功配对时头脑中大量传递的神经化学快感。配对时的“叮”声使大脑感受到与吃巧克力、看色情图片、或吸可卡因同样的快感。
Like any interface in our attention economy, there are “a thousand people on the other side of thescreen” whose job it is to keep you hooked, says “design ethicist” Tristan Harris, one of a growing band of ex-tech execs
reckoning with
the Frankensteins of their creation. Every last detail of the user experience is engineered tokeep our hands and eyes glued to the smartphone – from the colours and sounds of notifications to the timing of their receipt. “Let’s admit it: We are all in the persuasion business,” writes gaming entrepreneur Nir Eyal in
Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
, a playbook of sorts for what has been dubbed “the dark arts of attentional design”. “We call these people users,” he writes. “And even if we don’t say it aloud, we secretly wish every one of them would become fiendishly hooked to whatever we’re making.”
“设计伦理学家”特里斯坦·哈里斯说，注意力经济中任何用户界面设计的目的都是一样的，“屏幕的另一端有1000人”，他们的工作就是把你钓着。哈里斯是曾经是一位科技企业高管，现在已经退出这个行业。像他这样的人正变得越来越多，他们正在努力
对抗
吞噬着他们这些创造者的产品。用户体验的每个细节都被精心设计以保证我们的手和眼“粘”在屏幕上——从通知的颜色和声音到接收通知的时间把控。博弈型企业家尼尔·艾亚尔在《成瘾：如何开发能培育用户习惯的产品》一书中写道：“让我们承认吧：我们都在进行诱导性的商业活动”。这本“伪”指导手册被戏称为“注意力设计的黑暗艺术”。他在书中写道：“我们称这些人为用户。虽然我们不明说，但我们暗地里希望无论我们做出什么产品，都能让他们上瘾。”
译注：注意力经济将人类的注意力作为一种稀缺的资源并且运用经济学理论解决各种各样的信息管理问题；而用户界面设计指的是在用户体验和交互的指导下对各种软件、应用以及网站进行的设计。
reckoning with
someone or something that is powerfuland must be regarded seriously as a possible opponent, competitor, danger etc 处理，对付
Lesson one of Dark Arts 101? The
irresistible
pull of variable-schedule rewards. The brain releases dopaminenot upon the receipt of a reward but in anticipation of it (think dogs salivating at the sound signalling supper). This effect is amplified when the reward – in this case, a match – is uncertain. Research has shown that pigeons presented with a button that produces goodies (pellets of food or doses of drugs) in an unpredictable pattern will peck the heck out of the button, nearly twice as much as when the reward arrives in a predictable manner. Natasha DowSchüll, a cultural anthropologist who studies gambling addiction, has likened the
deliberate
design of dating apps to that of slot machines, with the same resultant risk of tumbling down the rabbit hole.
黑暗艺术101的第一课——
无法抵抗
多变的奖励。大脑会在预期将得到奖励的时候释放多巴胺，而非在真正得到奖励时（联想狗在听到代表晚餐的声音时流口水）。当奖励不确定时（就本文的例子来说，即配对），这一效应会更强烈。研究表明，给鸽子一个无规律出现好吃东西（小块食物或药剂）的按钮时，鸽子按动按钮的次数是有规律出现食物时的两倍。研究赌瘾的文化人类学家塔莎•道•舒尔把
精心设计的
约会应用比作老虎机：二者有着相同的使人上瘾的风险。
Dopamine was long thought to be the direct source of pleasure, until lab work led by University of Michiganneuroscientist Kent Berridge determined that dopamine is in fact only what motivates the movement toward pleasure – what he refers to as “wanting”. Adopamine-deficient rat won’t get off its metaphoric rat couch to eat if it’s hungry, but will lick its lips in rapture if fed a drop of sugar water on that couch.
人们一直以来认为多巴胺是快乐的直接来源，直到密歇根大学神经科学家肯特·贝里奇带领的实验研究发现，实际上多巴胺只是激发人们寻求快乐的动力——他称之为“渴望”。如果一只老鼠缺乏多巴胺，哪怕它饿了也不会主动离开自己的窝去觅食（译者注：缺乏多巴胺就会失去“渴望”）；但是当有一滴糖水在它窝里的时候，它就会开心地砸吧嘴：糖水就是它快乐的来源，而非多巴胺。
Our brains, explains Dr Berridge, are “more
stingy
with mechanisms for pleasure than for desire.”Evolution favours
go-getters
. But this wiring leaves us susceptible to getting stuck in “wanting” for a long – and not particularly pleasant – time. The more we spend time seeking, whether in search of drugs, sex or dating app dings, “we get less and less pleasure out of it, and the less and less balanced life becomes,” Morten Kringelbach, a neuroscientist and Senior Research Fellow at The Queen’s College at Oxford, told me. “That's the tragedy of addiction. We’re like an animal in a cage trapped in the same circus all the time.”
贝里奇教授解释称，与追逐欲望的机制相比，我们的大脑对寻求快乐的机制更
吝啬
。进化偏爱
富于进取心的人
。但是这样朝着更高目标努力的想法让我们更容易长时间陷入“渴望”，且这段“渴望”的过程中并不一定能为我们带来愉悦。我们越是花时间追求某事，无论追求毒品、性、或约会应用的“叮”声，“我们从中得到的快乐就越少，生活也变得越不平衡，”牛津大学王后学院的神经科学家及高级研究员莫腾·克林格尔巴赫告诉我。“这就是上瘾酿成的悲剧。我们就像笼中的动物，永远被困在同一个马戏团里。”
stingy
/
ˈstɪndʒi
/ adj. not generous, especially with money
吝啬
“Online dating apps are truly evolutionarily novel environments,” David Buss, a professor of psychology at the University of Texasat Austin who specialises in the evolution of human sexuality, has said. “But we come to those environments with the same evolved psychologies.” While natural rewards contain built-in
satiety
signals at consummation (one can onlyeat/dance/make love for so long), when we’re deliberately kept in the “wanting”phase by persuasive design, there is no signal telling us when to stop. The“infinite scroll” mechanism used by most dating apps takes advantage of this vulnerability by automatically loading the next page so that users don’t haveto pause, encouraging them to take just one more hit by swiping on just one more profile, and then another,
ad infinitum
.
专门研究人类性进化的得克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校的心理学教授大卫·巴斯说：从进化角度来看，线上约会的确是全新的新环境，但是在这些环境我们的心理也同样发生变化。”虽然自然的奖励机制会在我们完成某事时发出
满足
感信号（一个人不能一直吃、舞蹈、或做爱），但当我们被诱导性设计故意停留在“渴望”阶段时，没有信号告诉我们该什么时候停止。大多数约会应用的“无限旋涡”机制利用了用户的这一脆弱性：它通过自动加载下一页，使用户无须停止浏览，并鼓励用户再来一次——再划一下屏幕、再浏览下一个人的资料、再浏览另一个，
永无止境
。
Scientists have come to understand that the brain changes its physical structure as it performs various activities. Repetitive actions set
grooves
in neural pathways to make them the path of least resistance, allowing the brain to conserve energy. Digital daters get in the habit of automatically opening an app at certain times of the day or as the go-to solution to
quell
boredom or loneliness, whether or not they’re consciously aware of that feeling. Studies have yet to be conducted on the long-term effects of the dopaminergic excitation of dating apps on the brain (rats don’t have iPhones.) But even small doses of addictive drugs have been shown to lead to long-lasting or even permanent changes in neural circuitry, and behavioural cues are thought to work in much the same way as drugs. Like any addiction, it may not be so easy to walk away. (An
acquaintance
of mine had made it as far as a third date with a woman, only to be caught on a dating app when his date returned from the toilet.) He’s in good company: 22 per cent of men admit to the offence, according to the dating app company Hinge, although the dopamine hit was probably less powerful than the well-deserved
whack
he received with her handbag.)
科学家逐渐了解到，各种各样的脑活动最终会改变大脑本身的物理结构。重复的动作会使神经通路出现
沟槽
，使之阻力降为最低，便于大脑节约能量。网络交友者习惯于在一天中的某些时间自动打开应用程序，或视之为
减少
无聊或孤独的解决方法（无论他们是否意识到这些感觉）。人们尚未研究约会应用对大脑的多巴胺刺激会有怎样的长期效果（因为老鼠没有iPhone），但仅仅是小剂量的成瘾性毒品都会给神经回路带来长期甚至永久的改变，并且行为性暗示被相信与毒品起作用的方式相同。与任何成瘾相似的是，一旦上瘾，很难戒掉。（我的一位
熟人
与一位女性约会到第三次，直到她从洗手间回来时抓到他还在使用约会应用。）不止他一个人：根据约会应用公司Hinge的数据，22%的男性承认他们也会犯这种错误，尽管多巴胺带来的快感并不能抵消被女性手提包
打
时带来的痛感。
quell
/
