Dinner Diplomacy

晚餐外交

 

Sharing food leads to more successful negotiations

分享食物让谈判更成功

 

Sharing the kimchi would have helped

分吃泡菜本可能更好

 

Shrimp cocktail, grilled sirloin with pear kimchi and chocolate lava cake. Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un had the same food brought to them on individual plates during their summit on February 27th. Psychologists think a meal like this is a good first step towards improving relations. But new work suggests there might have been a more positive outcome with a different serving arrangement.

 

鲜虾杯，烤西冷牛排配韩式梨泡菜，然后是巧克力熔岩蛋糕。2月27日，特朗普和金正恩在峰会期间分盘享用了相同的食物。心理学家认为这样的同桌进餐是改善关系的良好开端。但新研究表明，另一种用餐安排可能会产生更积极的结果。

 

As Kaitlin Woolley of Cornell University and Ayelet Fishbach of the University of Chicago report in Psychological Science, a meal taken “family-style” from a central platter can greatly improve the outcome of subsequent negotiations.

 

康奈尔大学的凯特琳·伍利和芝加哥大学的阿耶莱特·费斯巴赫在《心理科学》杂志上发表的论文说，从同一个大盘中取食的“家庭式”进餐方式能大大改善后续谈判的结果。

 

Having conducted previous research in 2017 revealing that eating similar foods led to people feeling emotionally closer to one another, Dr Woolley and Dr Fishbach wondered whether the way in which food was served also had a psychological effect. They theorized that, on the one hand, sharing food with other people might indicate food scarcity and increase a notion of competition. However, they also reasoned that it could instead lead people to become more aware of others’ needs and drive co-operative behaviour as a result. Curious to find out, they set up a series of experiments.

 

伍利和费斯巴赫先前在2017年进行的研究发现，吃同样的食物会让人们在感情上更亲近。她们想知道上菜方式是否也会产生心理上的影响。她们推论，一方面，与其他人分享食物或许代表食物份量有限，进而会增强竞争意识。但她们也推测，或许分享会让人们留意到他人的需求，从而推动合作行为。她们很想知道事实到底如何，于是设计了一系列实验。

 

For the first test they recruited 100 pairs of participants from a local café, none of whom knew each other. In return for a $3 gift card and a chance to win $50 based upon their performance during a negotiation game, the participants were sat at a table and fed tortilla chips with salsa. Half the pairs were given their own basket of 20 grams of chips and a bowl of 25 grams of salsa, and half were given 40 grams of chips and 50 grams of salsa to share. As a cover for the experiment, all participants were told this snack was to be consumed before the game began.

 

在第一次实验中，她们从地方上的一家咖啡馆招募了200名互不相识的参与者，每两人一组。参与实验可获得3美元的礼品卡，并有机会在谈判游戏中根据表现赢得50美元。他们两人一桌，享用墨西哥玉米片配莎莎酱。研究者给其中50组每人单独上了一份20克的玉米片和一碗25克的莎莎酱，给另50组一份40克的玉米片和50克的莎莎酱，让两人分着吃。为了不让参与者知道真实用意，研究人员告诉他们，吃完这些小食，谈判游戏才会真正开始。

 

The game required the participants to negotiate an hourly wage rate during a fictional strike. Each person was randomly assigned to represent the union or management and follow a set of rules.

 

游戏而后要求参与者在一次虚构的罢工事件中谈判时薪。每一组中都随机分配一人扮演工会代表，另一个人扮演企业主管，双方遵循一套规则开展谈判。

 

The researchers measured co-operation by noting the number of rounds it took to reach an agreement, and found that those who shared food resolved the strike significantly faster (in 8.7 rounds) than those who did not (13.2 rounds). A similar experiment was conducted with 104 participants and Goldfish crackers, this time negotiating an airline’s route prices. The results were much the same, with the food-sharers negotiating successfully 63.3% of the time and those who did not share doing so 42.9% of the time.

 

研究人员记录下每组参与者最终达成协议所经历的谈判轮数，作为衡量合作程度的指标。她们发现分享一份食物的小组解决罢工的速度（8.7轮）明显快过那些分餐的小组（13.2轮）。另一项类似的实验招募了104名参与者，食物换成了金鱼饼干，谈判内容是航空公司的票价。实验结果大致相同：分享食物的参与者谈判成功率为63.3%，各吃各的小组的成功率为42.9%。

 

To see if food-sharing among friends worked in the same way as it did among strangers, Dr Woolley and Dr Fishbach ran their strike experiment again with 240 people, partnering together two friends or two strangers. Regardless of whether the pairs were friends or strangers, those who shared food went into fewer rounds during the game, averaging 6.4 rounds, than those who did not share food, averaging 9.8. Friendship did have an effect, though. Whether they shared food or not, friends were generally more co-operative.

 

伍利和费斯巴赫想知道朋友之间分享食物的效果是否与陌生人之间相同，于是再次组织了罢工实验，邀请了240人参加。这一次每组的两个参与者互为朋友或陌生人。结果发现，不管同组的两人是朋友还是陌生人，分享食物的小组在游戏中谈判的轮数更少，平均为6.4轮，没有分享食物的小组平均为9.8轮。但朋友关系确实有其影响。无论是否分享了食物，朋友之间的合作程度普遍更高。

 

Mr Trump and Mr Kim might balk at having to take turns serving themselves from platters in the centre of a table. But these results suggest that such an arrangement really could help world diplomacy.

 

特朗普和金正恩可能不大愿意轮流从桌子中间的大盘子里取食。但这些实验结果表明，这样的用餐方式很可能有助于世界外交。

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