After some of David Shulman’s friends lost almost everything to financial swindler Bernard Madoff nearly a decade ago, it made him wonder how well we know the people around us, especially at work.

　　大约十年前，继大卫舒尔曼的一些朋友因为金融骗子伯纳德·马多夫几近失去一切后，他想知道我们对身边人的了解到底有多少，尤其是工作中的人。

　　Could the financial analyst in the next cubicle turn out to be the next criminal mastermind? Is your work lunch buddy a natural-born deceiver? How well does any company know its employees?

　　隔壁隔间的金融分析师可能是下一个犯罪策划者吗?你的工作午餐伙伴是天生的骗子吗?任何公司对员工的了解情况如何?

　　To answer his own questions, Shulman, who has an economics degree and 30 years of experience as an executive with Wall Street capital firms, set out to design a test to find out. Like a lot of personality assessments, he hoped it would offer insights into what made someone tick. To help develop it, he brought in behavioural and psychometric scientists.

　　为了回答自己的问题，具有经济学学士学位和30年华尔街资本公司高管从业经历的舒尔曼开始设计测试来寻找真相。像很多个性评估一样，他希望能够深入了解什么让人犯嘀咕。为了有助于评估进展，他引入了行为和心理测量科学家。

　　To set a yardstick, Shulman started out by giving a prototype of the test to some of the worst among us—convicted criminals. The company he created, Veris Benchmarks, tested 812 white-collar criminals who had been convicted of 1,724 different offences, including forgery, embezzlement, and fraud. Then Shulman’s company gave the test to thousands of ordinary businesspeople, which provided a standard for “normal responses.”

　　为了设立一个标准，舒尔曼开始将测试原型定位我们当中最坏的一些人——罪犯。他所创建的公司Veris Benchmarks测试了812名白领罪犯，他们被判犯有1,724种不同的罪行，包括伪造，贪污和欺诈。然后，舒尔曼公司对成千上万名普通商人进行了测试，为“正常回应”提供了一个标准。

　　While the businesspeople scored lower or higher on things like truthfulness, in comparison, the criminals scored uniformly worse in accountability, conscientiousness, and empathy.

　　尽管商人在真实性方面得分较低或较高，但是相比之下，这些罪犯在问责制，认真性和同情心方面得分一致。

　　Most of the time, we determine whether we think someone is honest by our impression of them, for instance, by asking a series of questions during the hiring process, or by how they conduct themselves during everyday business dealings. But, that’s not foolproof.

　　大部分时候，我们通过自己的印象来决定一个人是否诚实，比如，通过在招聘过程中询问一系列问题，或者在每天的商业交易中他们如何进行自己的工作。但是，这并不是万无一失的。

　　“Talking to someone directly, and then bringing them on board because you like the way they answer questions is a dangerous way to hire someone,” says Shulman. “There’s simply no science that supports it.”

　　舒尔曼说：“直接和某人交谈，然后带他们入行，因为你喜欢他们回答问题的方式，这是雇佣他人危险的方式。这里没有科学来支持这种做法。”

　　In the past three years, Nilan Peiris has been involved in hiring more people than most of us will ever work with. His company, money transmission firm TransferWise, has grown from 60 employees to 700 in that time. And nearly every one of them has told at least a little white lie, he says. Spotting these isn’t so hard, according to Peiris.

　　在过去三年中，尼兰·佩里斯一直参与雇用比我们大多数人的同事数量更多的人。 他的公司——货币交易公司TransferWise——在当时从60名员工增加到了700名。他说，几乎每个人都至少说了一个善意的谎言。据Peiris透露，发现这些并不是那么难。

　　The most common one is when the candidate is asked why they’d like to work for TransferWise, Peiris said from London, where he serves as the company’s vice president of growth. “People usually say it’s because they’re passionate about money transfer,” Peiris says. “And I say, ‘OK, that’s not true. What’s the real reason? Because I’m not passionate about money transfers, and neither are the founders, and neither is anyone else here.”

　　佩里斯在伦敦担任公司发展副主任时称，最常见的谎言是当候选人被问及为什么他们想为TransferWise工作时。佩里斯说：“人们通常说是因为他们对货币交易充满激情。我会说，那是假的。真正的原因是什么?因为我对货币交易没有激情，创始人也不，这里的任何其他人也不。”

　　Maybe the real answer is that they want to work at a fast-growing company, or in the tech industry, or a hundred other reasons. But Peiris says the point of catching them in this untruth is to see how they react. “If they’re able to open up and be honest with us, then that tells us that they’re ready to go on to the next step,” Peiris says.

　　也许真正的原因是他们想在一家快速发展的公司工作，或者在科技行业工作，或者千百个理由。但是佩里斯说，捕捉这个不真实的地方是为了看他们作何反应。佩里斯说：“如果他们公开并且坦诚对待我们，然后告诉我们他们准备继续下一步。”

　　True honesty from anyone simply isn’t the reality, says Peiris, who suspects he has never actually seen a CV that doesn’t at least exaggerate a little bit.

　　佩里斯说，来自任何人的真诚都不是事实，他怀疑自己从未实际看到过一份毫不夸张的简历。

　　There’s also the issue of lying by omission. Perhaps you have a gap on your CV, —you may have spent time away from the workforce to go travelling or to start a family— so you might exaggerate the importance of the part-time job you had during that period. It might be a half-truth, but Headley says many people would see that as worth the risk and common practice.

　　这也是谎言遗漏。也许你的简历和你本人有差距——你可以已经去旅行或者成家，离开了岗位一段时间——因此，你可能夸张了那段日子里兼职工作的重要性。这可能不完全是事实，但是黑德利说，很多人认为这是值得的冒险和常见做法。

　　“Rather than trying to suss out people for whether they’re a liar, figure out if they’re someone who can do the job,” Headley says.

　　黑德利说：“与其试图找出人们是否是撒谎者，不如找出他们是否是能胜任工作的人。”

（编辑：何莹莹）