在网上查了下，你的句子确实有误。原句出自耶鲁大学的一篇心理学演讲。原文是这样的：
People differ to the extent it will hurt them to watch me slam my thumb with a hammer. 不同的人看到我用锤子敲打拇指会感受到不同程度的痛苦。
原文如下：
Introduction to Psychology
Yale University Lecture 15
Let me begin by just reminding us where we are in this course, reminding us of what we've done and what we have yet to do. We started by talking about the brain, the physical basis of thought. And then we moved to some general introductions to some foundational ideas in the study of psychology, Freud and Skinner. We spent a bit of time on more cognitive stuff: development, language, vision, memory. Then we took a little break and the dean told us about love. Then we dealt with the emotions, rationality, and evolution, and a lot of that. What we learned particularly regarding the evolution of the mind provided supporting material for what follows. We learned about cognitive neuroscience using the study of face recognition as an important case study--human differences, behavioral genetics, nature and nurture, sex and food. My lecture was on sex. Dr. Brownell came and spoke to us about food. Today, morality. Next week, social thought and social behavior, mysteries; basically, a series of topics that don't fit anywhere in the course and really make psychologists scratch their heads. These topics are sleep, laughter, and religion, mental illness, two lectures on madness, what can go wrong in your minds, and a last lecture on happiness. And then you're just done. You know a lot of psychology and a lot of stuff and you're well prepared for your ultimate major in psychology, ultimately graduate training at a good school. How many people here are either psych majors or expect to become psych majors or cognitive science as though you could raise your hand to? Okay. Good. It's nowhere near enough [laughter] and so I'll ask the question again. Once you deal with happiness and then mysteries, you're really not going to want to--What is there? Chemistry? Anthropology? [laughter] Pre-med? Give me a break. [laughter] Okay. We're going to deal with three facets of morality. I'm going to talk about moral feelings, moral judgments, and then moral action with particular focus on why good people do bad things, which will lead us to review and discuss the Milgram study, which was presented in the movie on Monday. Now, moral feeling is what we'll start off with and we've already discussed this in a different context. The question is, 'How could moral feelings evolve? So, moral feelings we could view as feelings of condemnation, shame, emotions like that--shame, condemnation, pride, righteous anger, but also simple affection, caring for other people, wanting to do well by them, being upset if an injustice is to be done by them. And you might think that the existence of these feelings is a mystery from an evolutionary point of view. If evolution is survival of the fittest, nature red in tooth and claw, how could animals evolve moral feelings? But in fact, we know the answer to this. And there are two answers to this. One answer is kin selection. So, evolution works at a level of the genes and because of that it could give rise to animals that are themselves altruistic. And they're altruistic because they act to preserve other animals that share the same genes. And so, I'm not going to spend any time on this because we've discussed it in detail, but we know from previous lectures that people will be generous to others. And there's an evolutionary explanation for your generosity towards kin. It could be mathematically worked out. Your caring, your moral feelings towards other creatures to the extent of the proportion of genes that you share with them. The most altruistic behavior of all, giving your life to help another, can be explained in cold-blooded evolutionary terms. Animals that are altruistic even to the point of dying to help another, those genes will, under some circumstances, be preserved over the genes of people who are less caring. And that is one force towards kindness. A second force towards kindness is cooperation. Even if animals are unrelated, they are nice to one another. Animals will give warning cries, they will groom one another, they will exchange food, and the reason for this 2 Introduction to Psychology Yale University Lecture 15 is that animals have evolved, our minds have evolved, to enter into sort of cooperative situations with other people and to surmount prisoner's dilemmas, to surmount deception and cheating. This gives rise to some emotion including emotions that could be viewed as moral emotions, like guilt and anger, and again, grounds altruistic behavior in an evolutionary perspective. This is all by means of review but the question you can now ask is, Fine. That's why moral feelings might evolve, but what do we know as psychologists about the emergence in nature of moral feelings in individuals? What's the psychology of moral feeling? And this is an issue I'm going to talk about now but I'm going to return to next week when we deal with issues such as liking and disliking, racial prejudice and other things. But I want to deal now with a couple of interesting case studies about moral feelings from a psychological point of view. The first one I want to deal with is empathy. And empathy has different definitions but we can simply view it as the feeling that your pain matters to me. If you are hurt, that is, in some sense, painful for me. If you are sad, that affects my own mood. I am not a selfish creature. I am built, I am hard wired, to be attuned to your pain. This is an old observation. Adam Smith, who is often falsely viewed as a proponent of selfishness and hardheadedness, was quite explicit about the pull this has. He notes: When we see a stroke aimed and just ready to fall upon the leg or arm of another person, we naturally shrink and draw back our own leg or arm and when it does fall we feel it in some measure and are hurt by it as well as the sufferer. If you see somebody being kicked in the groin in a movie, you might yourself tense up. If you see somebody bang their thumb with a hammer, you might cringe. Here is a good illustration of somebody in anticipatory pain. [laughter] Now--It's a very British face actually. [laughter] Now, we know certain things about this empathy, some which might be surprising. The pain of others is aversive even for babies. We know this because if babies hear other babies crying they will get upset. The crying of babies is aversive to babies. Now, some of you may be sufficiently cynical to say, That could be explained in other ways. For one thing, one theory is that babies hear other babies cry, because babies are so stupid they think they themselves are crying; if they're crying they must be in some sort of pain so they cry some more. But clever psychologists have ruled this out. What they did was a study where they exposed babies to tape-recorded sounds of other babies crying and tape recorded sounds of themselves crying. Babies cry more to this pain of other babies than they do to their own pain, suggesting that their response is to some extent a response to the otherness of the characters. We know pain is--of others is aversive for chimpanzees and we know this in certain ways. But we know this, in particular, from a series of studies that would be unethical if they were to be done today. In these studies, they put a chimpanzee in a room and there's a lever. And when the chimpanzee slaps the lever, it gets some food. Trivial, smart animal, piece of cake. But the room has a window leading to another room. And in the other room another chimpanzee is placed. This second chimpanzee is not a relative of the first chimpanzee and they've never seen each other before. Now, when the first chimpanzee hits the lever the second chimpanzee gets a painful electric shock, putting the first chimpanzee in a horrible dilemma. In 3 Introduction to Psychology Yale University Lecture 15 order to feed himself, he has to torture another animal. Chimpanzees do not starve themselves to death. It's very unlikely any of you would either but they go a long time without food, suggesting they do not want to cause this other chimpanzee pain. It only works within species. So, in another experiment they put a rabbit in the other room and the chimpanzee would slap the lever repeatedly to make the rabbit scream in pain [laughter] and jump. Now, we've known for a long time that empathetic feeling is not logically linked to morality. This is a point made by Aristotle. I could see you writhing in pain. That could cause me pain but it doesn't mean I'm going to be nice to you. I could run away from you. I could turn my head or I could blame you for causing me this misery. But it does happen that emotional--that this sort of empathy does lead to moral concern and action. If we do an experiment and we induce you to feel empathetic to somebody, we get you to feel what they're feeling, you're more likely to be nice to them. And people differ in the extent to which they feel empathy. People differ to the extent it will hurt them to watch me slam my thumb with a hammer. If you are high empathy, you're more likely to be a nice person than if you're low empathy, suggesting there is some connection between empathetic feeling and liking. Now, empathetic feeling, like any other human capacity, differs across people. Some of us have a lot of it. Some of us don't have much of it. There is some reason to believe that in the population known as psychopaths, a population we'll return to later on when we discuss mental illness, this sort of instinctive empathy is broken and the pain of others just doesn't bother them very much. I have some illustrative quotes here. In Damon's book, a wonderful book on psychopathy, he talks about a thirteen-year-old mugger who specialized in mugging blind people. And when asked about the pain he caused his victims he responded, What do I care? I'm not her, which is logically correct but, in a sense, inhuman. The fact that it's another person should make you care. The serial killer Gary Gilmore basically said the pain of others gratified him and caused him no unhappiness at all. I was always capable of murder. I can become totally devoid of feelings of others, unemotional.
