美国选举态度调查报告 害羞的选民

Last week, UBS released a survey of 1,200 of its American clients and their attitudes towards the US election.

不久前，瑞银(UBS)发布了对其1200名美国客户以及他们对美国选举的态度的调查报告。

It revealed some striking insights — after the election, for example, the proportion of investors who were bullish about US stocks jumped from 25 per cent to 53 per cent, while those who were bullish about growth rose from 39 per cent to 48 per cent.

该报告揭示出一些引人注目的见解——例如，在美国大选后，看好美国股市的投资者比例从25%飙升至53%，同时看好美国经济增长的投资者比例从39%升至48%。

There was, however, an even more important detail: 36 per cent of respondents said that they did not tell their friends and family who they voted for, because they wanted to fend off arguments or avoid judgment.

然而，该报告中更为重要的细节是，36%的受访者表示，他们没有告诉朋友和家人自己投了谁，因为他们希望避免争论或遭到评判。

Yes, you read that right.

是的，你没看错。

Among these wealthy and (presumably) educated UBS clients, more than one-third were apparently too nervous or embarrassed to reveal their election choice.

在这些富裕而且（想必）受过良好教育的瑞银客户当中，逾三分之一的人似乎害怕或羞于透露他们在选举中的选择。

Call it, if you like, a plague of squeamish silence.

如果你愿意的话，可以将这称为一场神经脆弱所致沉默的瘟疫。

Sadly, UBS does not have any long-term data with which to compare this result (I checked), and since the sample is tiny, it may be very biased.

遗憾的是，瑞银没有任何能与这一结果相对照的长期数据（我核查过了），而且由于样本数量很少，结果也可能偏差很大。

But I suspect the result points to a bigger pattern — and one that may help explain why Trump won, in stark contrast to the pollsters’ predictions.

但我怀疑调查结果揭示出一种更为广泛的模式，它可能有助于解释为何与民调机构预测大相径庭的是，特朗普赢得了大选。

As I criss-crossed the US this past year, I often heard middle-class, professional people tell me — with slightly embarrassed smiles — that they understood the appeal of Trump’s promises about change.

我在过去的一年里走遍了美国各地，经常听到中产阶级和专业人士（带着略有些尴尬的笑容）告诉我，他们理解特朗普承诺改变的吸引力。

Yes, their comments were typically laced with distaste for his aggressive persona and words — you only have to look at his outburst against Saturday Night Live to see why his tweets make people wince.

没错，他们在说这些的时候通常还夹带着对特朗普激进形象和言辞的反感——你只需看看他对《周六夜现场》(Saturday Night Live)的发飙就会明白为何他在Twitter上的帖子让人们蹙眉了。

But what struck me on my travels was that people voting for Hillary Clinton were rarely embarrassed to admit to it.

但在旅途中让我印象深刻的是，投票给希拉里.克林顿(Hillary Clinton)的人们很少会不好意思承认。

Instead, they were resigned or dutiful.

相反，他们是无可奈何的或有责任心的。

In political terms, a vote for Clinton seemed akin to eating spinach.

投票给希拉里似乎就像政治上的吃菠菜，

A vote for Trump, however, was more like eating ice-cream laced with whisky for breakfast — something that establishment people did not want to admit to.

而投票给特朗普，更像是早餐吃冰激凌就威士忌——建制派人士不想承认的吃法。

I suspect that this reticence will last for some time.

我怀疑，这种沉默将会持续一段时间。

Last week, I travelled to Minneapolis (for the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association) and discovered that the local media were gripped by a debate about how to handle family gatherings amid all the political poison unleashed by the Trump win.

不久前，我去了明尼阿波利斯（参加美国人类学协会(American Anthropological Association)年会），发现当地媒体热议的一个话题是，如何在特朗普胜选释放的政治有毒空气中处理家庭聚会。

Some people feel so angry that they are taking radical measures.

一些人极为愤慨，因此采取了激进的举措。

I sent an email to an in-law telling him that his genial hockey buddy and Trump supporter friend, Johnny, was no longer welcome on Thanksgiving! a front-page column in Minnesota’s Star Tribune declared.

明尼苏达州的《明星论坛报》(Star Tribune)头版的一篇专栏文章宣称：我给姻亲发了一封电子邮件，告诉他，今年感恩节，他那位支持特朗普的随和的曲棍球伙伴约翰尼(Johnny)不再是受欢迎的客人。

However, most writers — and advice columnists — took a different tack and decided, like the UBS respondents, that it would be better to avoid fights caused by too much honesty this Thanksgiving and Christmas.

然而，大多数作者（以及问答栏目专栏作家）采取了不同的做法，他们与瑞银受访者一样，认为在今年感恩节和圣诞节期间最好避免因过于诚实而导致争执。

In other words, I suspect there will be lots of loaded, tactful silences around the dinner table, much as there were with the pollsters.

换言之，我怀疑晚餐期间会出现意味深长的、策略性的沉默，就像面对民调机构一样。

All of this has three important implications.

所有这些有3个重要意义。

First, it suggests that anybody who wants to guess how the forthcoming elections will turn out in France, Italy and the Netherlands needs to be careful about trusting poll results.

首先，它表明，无论是谁想要猜测法国、意大利和荷兰即将举行的选举情况都需要谨慎，别轻易相信民调结果。

Maybe voters in Europe are less shy about non-traditional choices but I doubt it.

或许欧洲的选民不会那么羞于说出自己的非传统选择，但我对此表示怀疑。

A second lesson is that the polling industry needs to rethink the questions it asks.

第二个教训是，民调业有必要重新思考它所问的问题。

It is striking, for example, that the one poll that was more accurate than most was conducted by the right-leaning political consultancy the Trafalgar Group.

例如，引人注目的是，一个比大多数民调都更为准确的民调是由偏右的政治咨询公司Trafalgar Group进行的。

Early on, it decided that people were lying about their voting intentions.

该公司很早就认定，人们不会如实透露自己的投票打算。

So it started asking questions such as how respondents’ neighbours were likely to vote.

因此，它开始问诸如受访者的邻居可能投谁之类的问题。

Not only did this deliver a different result but it enabled Trafalgar to predict the result in both Pennsylvania and Michigan.

这种做法不仅得出了不同的结果，而且还让Trafalgar预测到了宾夕法尼亚州和密歇根州的投票结果。

The third, and biggest, lesson is that pollsters and political pundits need to move beyond their obsession with complicated mathematical models, and participate in more ethnographic research into subtle cultural trends of the sort that anthropologists do (on the shame problem, for example).

第三个、也是最大的教训是，民调机构和政治评论员需要摆脱对复杂数学模型的痴迷，对微妙的文化趋势（比如在害羞的问题上）展开更多人种志研究，就像人类学家做的那样。

Of course, such an undertaking will not be easy.

当然，此类研究不会轻松。

Ethnographic research is time-consuming and cannot be plugged neatly into spreadsheets.

人种志研究极为耗费时间，而且无法整齐地编排为电子表格。

And while last week’s meeting of the AAA revealed some amazing, grassroots work that anthropologists are doing to understand shifting American culture, it also reminded me why so few non-anthropologists know about these insights: this breed of academic tends to be very shy about pushing their analyses into the mainstream in a timely way, especially when it comes to politics.

尽管不久前的美国人类学协会会议揭示出，人类学家正在做一些引人注目的基础工作来理解处于转变当中的美国文化，但它也提醒我，为何非人类学家很少知道这些见解：人类学学者往往非常不愿意及时将他们的研究推向主流，尤其是在政治问题上。

If nothing else, the US election has shown us that we all urgently need to relearn the art of listening — to anthropologists, mavericks, naysayers and, yes, to people with opposing opinions.

别的不说，美国大选向我们表明，我们全都亟需重新学习聆听的艺术——聆听人类学家、持另类观点者、唱反调者、（没错）还有持相反观点者的声音。

I hope that anthropologists get more plugged into the polling world.

我希望，人类学家更加专注民调领域。

But I also hope that yesterday’s shy voters start to talk more openly in the months ahead about why they disliked the status quo.

但我也希望，过去害羞的选民在今后几个月开始更为公开地谈论他们为何不喜欢现状。

Only then will America be truly ready for change, with or without shame.

只有到那时，美国才会真正准备好迎接改变，无论是否带着羞涩。