四级英语阅读：2026年6月四级英语真题 卷三 PASSAGE TWO

Questions 51 to 55 are based on the following passage.

After finding out details about a stranger, we mistakenly think that they also know about us. As a result, we act more honestly around them, according to a recent study in Nature.

Past research has found that we tend to assume social relationships are reciprocal (相互的). Most of the time, this assumption is accurate: someone you think of as a friend will usually consider you a friend too. But sometimes our social ties are more one-sided: for example, you might learn something about a stranger who doesn’t know you at all. Researchers Anuj Shah and Michael LaForest wondered whether our tendency to believe that social ties are reciprocal could lead us to mistakenly feel that a stranger does actually know us.

In a series of lab-based studies, this is exactly what the researchers found. When we know about strangers, we erroneously think they also know about us. But the really interesting finding came when the researchers stepped out of the lab, to conduct a field experiment. The team developed leaflets (传单) containing fairly ordinary information about local community police officers, such as their favourite food, hobbies, or reasons for joining the police force. They then sent out these leaflets to every apartment in a number of housing developments in disadvantaged areas. The officers themselves also dropped off cards to local residents containing similar information.

Two months later, the researchers surveyed residents at these housing developments as well as control areas that did not receive leaflets or outreach cards. Residents were asked to imagine that they had committed a crime and how likely it would be that local officers would find out about it. They also rated how well the officers in the area knew them.

The team found that residents of the developments that had received the leaflets believed it more likely that local officers would find out about illegal activity than residents of the control areas. Even more strikingly, the team found that immediately after the leaflet distribution, there were fewer criminal complaints and arrests in the areas around the developments that had received the leaflets than around the control developments.