Stand at the bottom of a big hill and you can exhaust yourself just thinking about climbing it. But a new study suggests it’s not as bad as it looks. Because people tend to ____1____ the steepness of slopes, and not because we’re lazy.

Psychologists have long assumed that our misperception of slope was ____2____ by fatigue or even fear of falling. If we see going up or down a hill as difficult, our perception could be influenced by our point of view.

But researchers at Ohio State University have found it isn’t so. The scientists asked 200 passersby to estimate the angle of a set of stairs, and another 200 to do the same for an ____3____—which, of course, requires no effort to ascend. In each case, half the subjects looked from the bottom and half from the top.

The results: viewers ____4____ overestimated the slant of each slope by about 20 degrees. The work appears in the journal Psychological Science.

The researchers are not sure what drives this ____5____. Perhaps it’s because our visual system evolved to be overly sensitive to even slight departures from the horizontal, to help keep us upright. Because ‘not falling down’ is the first step to making it up that hill.
【视听版科学小组荣誉出品】
overestimate biased escalator consistently angular disparity
站在大山脚下，光想着爬上去就让你累得够呛了。但一项新研究显示，事情并没有你想象中那么难，因为人们倾向于高估边坡陡度——但这并不是因为大家生性懒惰。 心理学家一直假定我们对山坡的错误认知受到了身体的疲劳，或者甚至是受到了对掉下山的恐惧的影响。假如我们将登山和下山看做一件难事的话，自身的观点就会影响我们对山坡的看法。 但俄亥俄州的研究人员发现事实并不是这样的。科学家询问了200个行人，让他们评估楼梯的坡度，然后又找了另外200人去评估自动扶梯的坡度——人们总不用攀登自动扶梯了吧。每一次实验都有一半人从下往上看，另一半人从上往下看。 结果就是：观察者总是高估了大概20度的坡度。这项研究刊登在《心理科学》杂志上。 研究人员并不确定是什么因素导致了坡度的出入。可能是由于视觉系统进化，使得我们对些微高于水平面的物体过度敏感，以此帮助我们挺直腰杆。因为“不掉下山”是成功登山的第一步呀。