同志社大學で2012年に出題された問題文です。設問は、大部分が客觀形式で、語(句)義、語句插入、英問英答、竝べ換へ、内容眞僞など。記述式の設問は下線部和譯1題でした。
月曜日と金曜日に、パラグラフ毎に解説して參ります。
①
Your favorite coffee shop is crowded with people who are stressed out, and you are standing shoulder to shoulder with them in a slow-moving line. The pushing and elbowing of the crowd worsens your severe social anxiety. You start gasping for air, your heart quickens, and you want to run away.
②
You force yourself to stay, however. You manage that achievement only because you are not actually there. You are living this experience through your avatar, an animation that represents you in a virtual environment. In reality, you have never made it to the counter during the morning rush, but you can get there on a computer. The experience of watching your digital look-alike smoothly reach the front of the virtual line and order a pretend drink is real enough, research suggests, to help you learn to cope with similar situations in the actual world.
③
Recent studies have demonstrated that watching an avatar that resembles you can influence your thoughts, feelings, and actions, which is called the “doppelgänger* effect.” Doppelgänger avatars allow you to see yourself perform a desired action, live out a fantasy or take on a slimmer, fatter, or older form. For instance, you can help people make smarter decisions about money. In a recent study, a psychologist, Hal Ersner-Hershfield, and his colleagues created look-alike avatars of 50 participants whom they had digitally aged to 70 years old. Each user “went inside” his or her avatar and peered out onto the virtual scenery from the perspective of a new self. Thus, researchers made some participants look in a virtual mirror to acquaint themselves with their senior selves while they answered questions known to enhance identification with an avatar, such as “What is your greatest fear?” and “What is your greatest hope?”
④
Participants were then told to allocate $1,000 to four purposes: a special occasion, someone else, a short-term savings account, and a retirement savings account. Those who had seen their older selves opted to put twice as much into their retirement account as those who had not seen their aged selves. In a similar study, exposure to senior counterparts reduced participants’ prejudices against older people, as compared with the attitudes of subjects who did not meet their digitally aged doppelgängers.
⑤
In addition to giving people a new perspective, doppelgänger avatars may be able to modify behavior by providing substitute reinforcement. Jesse Fox, a communications researcher at Ohio State University, and her colleagues created avatar doubles for 69 college and graduate students who then watched their artificial selves eat in a virtual-reality environment. The avatar sat in front of a bowl of carrots and a bowl of chocolates. When the avatar ate chocolate, it got fat, and when it snacked on carrots, it slimmed down.
⑥
Afterward, participants filled out a survey, which was placed next to a bowl of chocolates. The female participants who witnessed their avatars gaining and losing weight and felt absorbed in the scenario consumed less of the available chocolate than did those whose avatars did not change or who did not buy into the virtual experience. Many of the women thought the visual reinforcement had altered their attitude and behavior. “Even though I really dislike carrots,” one said, “I liked watching myself get thinner, so watching the weight loss take place made me want to eat more healthily.”
⑦
Avatars can also be used for less virtuous purposes, such as making us feel more favorable toward a product than we might otherwise be. Already commercials feature actors who look, sound, and act like the people in the community they target, in order to get consumers to envision themselves as owners or users of a particular product. A doppelgänger avatar might be an even more powerful way to accomplish the same goal.
⑧
In 2010 researchers at Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab decided to test the power of avatars to influence consumers. They asked 80 students to log on to a website and watch virtual endorsements of imaginary soft-drink brands. Some brands appeared in advertisements with text endorsements only. Others were shown with a picture of a stranger or a picture of the participant as a spokesperson. In a survey asking which brand participants preferred, most chose the one that appeared with their own image. This finding suggests that advertisers might benefit from appropriating static images of individuals from, for example, social network sites, in order to personalize their marketing.
⑨
The most appealing spokespersons of all, however, might be fully controllable doppelgänger avatars of the type featured in extremely absorbing virtual games. When Stanford students entered such a virtual setting featuring their doppelgänger in a soft-drink T-shirt, they highly endorsed the product on the shirt, provided they could control and manipulate their digital doubles. Such studies indicate the degree to which our opinions may be vulnerable to influence by anyone who decides to take and manipulate our digital image and put it before us. “Our identities are on the verge of becoming that mixture of our physically real and virtual self or selves,” says sociologist Sherry Turkle of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 【846 words】
(Adapted from Samantha Murphy, “Your Avatar, Your Guide,” Scientific American Mind, March / April, 2011)
