Passage 3

Questions 11 to 15 are based on the following passage:

 (80) As the Titanic was sinking and women and children climbed into lifeboats, the musicians from the ship’s band stood and played. They died when the ship went down. Men stood on the deck and smoked cigarettes. They died, too. This behavior is puzzling to economists, who like to believe that people tend to act in their own self interest. “There was no pushing,” says David Savage, an economist at Queensland University in Australia who has studied witness reports from the survivors. It was “very, very orderly behavior.”

Savage has compared the behavior of the passengers on the Titanic with those on the Lusitania, another ship that also sank at about the same time. But when the Lusitania went down, the passengers panicked(恐慌). There were a lot of similarities between these two events. These two ships were both luxury ones, they had a similar number of passengers and a similar number of survivors.

The biggest difference, Savage concludes, was time. The Lusitania sank in less than 20 minutes. But for the Titanic, it was two-and-a-half hours. “If you’ve got an event that lasts two-and-a-half hours, social order will take over and everybody will behave in a social manner,” Savage says.“If you’re going down in under 17 minutes, basically it’s instinctual.” On the Titanic, social order ruled, and it was women and children first. On the Lusitania, instinct won out. The survivors were largely the people who could swim and get into the lifeboats.

Yes, we’re self-interested, Savage says. But we’re also part of a society. Given time, social norms (规范) can beat our natural self-interest. A hundred years ago, women and children always went first. Men were stoic (坚忍的). On the Titanic, there was enough time for these norms to become forceful.