By Sophie Zhang

張奐瑤 注

Most children are taught by their parents not to talk to strangers when they’re young. But how do we know that it’s really wrong? What can we draw upon to tell us whether or not it is safe or not? Over the past semester, I’ve spoken to numerous strangers with no consequence at all. In fact, most of the times I interact with other strangers are for my own benefit. So how do we tell when it’s truly wrong?

Firstly, we can look at ethics, which, in a sense, deals with questions regarding morality. Our ethics challenge us to decide if something is good or bad, right or wrong, or noble or ignoble. In fact, the question that we have posed today is very much an ethical question. Is talking to strangers wrong? When we decide whether or not talking to strangers is wrong, we draw on our ethics to make such moral judgments for us. We look at the moral consequences of such action, and we draw on our own personal moral standards. For example, omegle is a popular social website in which the user is paired with random strangers to chat with. In fact, the tagline itself, and what the site uses to draw people in, is “Talk to strangers!” Next to each chat box, there is a button that is labeled “Next.” The purpose of the “next” button is simply to allow the user to disconnect with the stranger if they feel that the stranger is somehow unsafe, unsuitable, or perhaps simply boring. The first question that many will ask immediately to their stranger is “ASL?” Or in normal speak, “Age, sex, location?” The question posed here is very much a split-second ethical question. If we examine the three questions on their own, we can see that each question helps us determine whether or not talking to them is right or wrong. Firstly, age—if the stranger is too young or too old, we may decide that it is, in fact, “wrong” or “morally incorrect” to talk to that stranger. Secondly, “sex”—if a woman ends up chatting with a male, she may decide that it is “wrong” to talk to a member of the opposite gender, who could potentially be more dangerous than a female. Lastly, “location”—although we claim to be unbiased towards country of origin, it still plays an important role in our moral judgments. For example, some countries may be “safer”, or “less wrong” than others. On omegle, during a test run , I pretended to be a person from both the United States and Iraq. I was next-ed almost every time when I was the woman from Iraq, and almost never next-ed when I was “from” the United States. So, we can see that our decisions are based heavily on our own personal ethical frameworks .

Next, we have psychology as another area of knowledge. Psychology deals with how we decide to judge strangers, and whether or not they’re worth speaking to. In fact, psychologists at Stanford University conducted an experiment where he showed college students 80 photos of strangers, and then asked them which ones they recognized from among the 40 they’d seen in an earlier session. The more attractive the photo (as rated by another group of students), the more likely it was to be recognized—regardless of whether the face had been seen before or not. In this case, the face’s attractiveness actually changed the students’ perception of the past. This psychological effect is because we associate attractive people with positive qualities, and are less likely to associate them with being “strangers”, or “dangerous.” A lot of this experiment has to do with emotion and perception later.

Lastly, we have history—or what we know from the past. Why do we think that talking to strangers is wrong? We think that it’s wrong because we know from the past that it can be wrong. For example, it has been established that hundreds of thousands children in the past have been kidnapped and murdered by strangers. We know this to be true. Dangerous strangers aren’t just a guess or an assumption—we have witnessed numerous occasions of people being killed or hurt by strangers. We know, based on past experiences and occasions, that this is true. And thus, we often conclude that talking to strangers IS wrong, because they have been proven to be dangerous in the PAST.

But it’s interesting, because all three of these areas of knowledge have the human factor—all of them depend on individual people, and vary from person to person—even history—the interpretation of past facts can similarly vary from each individual to the next. Thus, how much “certainty” can we achieve? Basically, the amount of certainty we can achieve not only depends on the individual, but also the stranger. Because in the interaction, there are two people: “you and the stranger.” But you are both yourself and the stranger, because you’re the stranger to the other person as well.

While we can conclude that some strangers are dangerous, we can also conclude that most strangers are not, and those that are, are an exception to the norm . All of our friends were once strangers to us—so clearly, not all strangers are dangerous. Most of us are able to decide for ourselves whether or not someone is dangerous—using our ethics, psychological instincts, and past experiences, as well as emotion, perception, and logical reasoning. So after this, what is our conclusion? Well, what we conclude is that we can’t know for sure that talking to strangers is wrong. We can’t ever be certain that talking to strangers isn’t dangerous, or unsafe. But in essence, this was the conclusion that we were seeking—because we can’t really know whether or not talking to strangers is wrong, we can’t simply allow ourselves to assume that talking to strangers is wrong, or somehow more dangerous than talking to trusted ones, as our generation has done.

So next time you tell your child to be wary of strangers, maybe you’d better think twice.

Vocabulary

1. draw upon(on): 依據……，由……推斷。

2. semester: 學期；numerous: 許多的，眾多的。

3. ethics: 道德標準；morality: 道德，德行。

4. 道德考驗著我們，讓我們對事情的好壞，對錯，高尚與卑鄙做出判斷。ignoble: 卑鄙的，不光彩的。

5. moral standards: 道德標準。

6. Omegle: 由美國人開發的一個熱門社交網站，來自不同國家的用戶可以在上面與陌生人速配聊天；random: 隨機的；任意的。

7. tagline: 口號。

8. “跳過”鍵的作用是方便用戶在隱約感到這個陌生人不安全，不適合或者讓人厭煩時，能中斷與他/她的對話。

9. split-second: 精準的。

10. unbiased: 不帶偏見的，公正的；moral judgment: 道德判斷。

11. test run: 初步測試。

12. personal ethical framework: 個人道德準則。

13. Stanford University: 斯坦福大學，坐落于美國加利福尼亞州的斯坦福市，是一所私立學校，被公認為是世界上最好的大學之一；session: （實驗的）階段。

14. attractiveness: （樣貌的）吸引力；perception: 認知。

15. 產生這種心理作用是因為我們習慣將漂亮的人與良好的品質聯系起來，不太可能由他們聯想到 “陌生人”或“危險”等。

16. kidnap: 綁架。

17. assumption: 假定，臆斷；occasion: 情況，場合。

18. an exception to the norm: 不合常理的特例。

19. psychological instinct: 心理直覺；logical reasoning: 邏輯推理。

20. be wary of: 提防，小心；think twice: 再三思量，反復考慮。

（來源：英語學習雜志 編輯：丹妮）