The researchers recruited 495 people to participate in their study about food restrictions and loneliness.

研究人员招募了495名人员参与他们关于节食和孤独潜在联系的研究。

Skipping an office birthday party or a business lunch may mean less opportunities to connect.

不参加单位的生日派对或者工作午餐可能意味着减少了接触和联系的机会。

Could losing weight make you less popular? That’s the intriguing question asked by a trio of scientists in a new study.

减肥真的会让你不再受欢迎吗？这个有趣的问题正是三位科学家在最新的一项研究中提出的。

“Food provides an avenue for people to communicate and relate to others, and food practices— from daily eating to celebratory occasions—are an important part of social interaction,” they wrote in a new paper just published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. But what if someone is on a diet and can’t join in with what everyone else is eating? Or, perhaps in a more prevalent example, what if somebody is gluten-free or diabetic and avoids the office party serving cake for someone’s birthday?

科学家们在一篇刚发表在《人格与社会心理学杂志》的论文中指出：“食物为人们的交流和彼此联系提供一个通道，饮食行为，无论是日常饮食还是特殊的庆祝行为，都是社交中很重要的一部分。”但是如果一个人正在节食不能与其他人一起进餐呢？或者，一个更为相关的例子是，如果一个人是无麸质饮食者或是糖尿病饮食，在单位为某员工举办的生日派对上不能吃蛋糕呢？

The scientists—Kaitlin Woolley and Ronghan Wang of Cornell University and Ayelet Fishbach of the University of Chicago—interviewed hundreds of people for the new study, as well as conducted several different experiments in the field. They examined a whole host of eating habits —from people who dieted for health reasons (due to an allergy, weight issues, chronic illness, etc.) to those who avoided certain foods for cultural or ethical reasons (religious prohibitions, vegetarianism and so forth.)

科学家们——康奈尔大学的Kaitlin Woolley和Ronghan Wang以及芝加哥大学的Ayelet Fishbach——为该项新研究采访了数百人，也在该领域进行了若干不同的实验。他们考察了很多饮食习惯，从因健康原因节食的人们，比如说因为过敏、体重、慢性病等原因节食，到因习俗和道德原因拒绝食用特定食物（宗教禁忌、素食主义者等等）。

What they found was that adhering to a diet may lead to social isolation. “Overall, while both food restrictions and loneliness are on the rise; this research found they may be related epidemics,” the scientists wrote.

他们发现遵循一种饮食习惯或许会导致社会隔离。“一般来说，因为饮食禁忌和孤独都在呈上升趋势，这项研究发现它们可能是相关流行病。”科学家们写道。

In their conclusion, they point out that they’d like to conduct further research focusing on specific demographics, such as baby boomers. According to the researchers, that population in particular is “more vulnerable to medically imposed dietary restrictions” and “are overrepresented in the growing segment of socially isolated adults.”

在结论中，他们指出，他们将基于具体的人口统计数据进行更为深入的研究，比如说婴儿潮。科学家们认为，特定人口“对医学上被迫的节食更为敏感”，并且“在日益增长的社会隔离成人群体中占绝大多数”。

For Fishbach, an Israeli psychologist, this new study builds upon her prior canon of research. Back in 2016, she discovered that eating similar foods at a business lunch promotes trust and closeness between strangers. Breaking bread with someone indeed brings people closer together. She even found that eating food from a shared plate fostered greater cooperation than eating the same food, but from individual plates. “It’s a direct extension of that previous work,” she told From The Grapevine about her new findings. “If food connects, then food restrictions might isolate.”

对以色列的心理学家Fishbach教授来说，该项新研究以她之前的研究为基础。早在2016年，她发现在工作餐中食用相似食物的陌生人更容易促进信赖和亲近感。跟他人分享面包的确能让人们更亲近。她甚至发现从一个盘子里面吃饭比从各自的盘子中食用相同的食物更能促进合作。她告诉From The Grapevine她的新发现时说：“这是基于之前研究工作的延伸发现。如果食物能联结人们的情感，那么节食就可能导致孤立。”

Sharing food might be the ultimate icebreaker.

分享食物或许是最有效的“破冰”之法。

Dr. Fishbach—who earned her undergraduate, graduate and doctorate degrees at Israel’s Tel Aviv University—has published prolifically about the topic of motivation and decision-making. For example, she has studied why good people sometimes make unethical decisions, why we give to some charities and not to others and why failure is not the great learning tool we all think it is.

“It’s an exciting time for the behavioral sciences because there’s so much interest in society, and so many applications in a way,” Fishbach told us. “Things that 20 years ago we were doing, and no one really paid attention except for our community and our students, right now there is much more media exposure. There is much more an attempt to apply these findings. So, it’s a really exciting time for the social sciences in general, and the behavioral sciences in particular.”

Fishbach博士在以色列特拉维夫大学完成了本科、研究生和博士教育。她在动机和决定方面的著作颇丰。例如，她研究过为什么好人有时会做出不道德的决定，为什么我们向某些慈善机构捐赠而没有选择其他的捐赠结构，为什么不像我们都认为的那样，失败并不是很好的学习工具。Fishbach博士告诉我们：“目前是行为科学的很好的发展时机，因为对社会的关注兴趣越来越多，并且在某一点上，有很多的发现应用于社会。20年前我们做的事情除了我们的团队和学生没有人关注。但是现在，有了更多的媒体曝光，有了更多的将这些发现应用起来的尝试。所以，目前的时代总体来说对社会科学是一个非常有利的时代，尤其是对行为科学来说。”

本文英文来自From the Grapevine，已选入《快捷英语 活页英语时文阅读理解 高考19》，参考译文由快捷英语整理。转载需注明出处。

更多学习资料点击下方蓝色链接免费获取。