Which of the following is true about the first experiment?（ ）

Read the following passage and choose the most likely answer to each of the following questions.

        Honesty may be the best policy, but lying has its merits—even when we are deceiving ourselves. Numerous studies have shown that those who are practiced in the art of self-deception might be more successful in the spheres of sport and business. They might even be happier than people who are always true to themselves. But is there ever a downside to believing our own lies?
        A study by Zoe Chance of Yale University tested the idea, by watching what happens when people cheat on tests.
        Chance and her colleagues ran experiments which involved asking students to answer IQ and general knowledge questions. Half the participants were given a copy of the test paper which had—apparently “in error”一been printed with the answers listed at the bottom. This meant they had to resist the temptation to check or improve their answers against the real answers as they went along.
        As you’d expect, some of these participants couldn’t help but cheat. Collectively, the group that had access to the answers performed better on the tests than participants who didn’t一even though both groups of participants were selected at random from students at the same university, so were, on average, of similar ability. We can’t know for sure who was cheating—probably some of the people who had answers would have got high scores even without the answers—but it means that the average performance in the group was partly down to individual smarts, and partly down to having the answers at hand.
        The crucial question for Chance’s research was this: did people in the “cheater” group know that they’d been relying on the answers? Or did they attribute their success in the tests solely to their own intelligence?
        The way the researchers tested this was to ask the students to predict how well they’d do on a follow-up test. They were allowed to quickly glance over the second test sheet so that they could see that it involved the same kind of questions—and, importantly, that no answers had been “mistakenly” printed at the bottom this time. The researchers reasoned that if the students who had cheated realized that cheating wasn't an option the second time around, they should predict they wouldn't do as well on this second test.

        Not so. Self-deception won the day. The people who’d had access to the answers predicted, on average, that they’d get higher scores on the follow-up—equivalent to giving them something like a 10-point IQ boost. When tested, however, they scored far lower.
        The researchers ran another experiment to check that the effect was really due to the cheaters’ inflated belief in their own abilities. In this experiment, students were offered a cash reward for accurately predicting their scores on the second test. Sure enough, those who had been given the opportunity to cheat overestimated their ability and lost out—earning 20% less than the other students.
        The implication is that people in Chance’s experiment—people very much like you and me—had tricked themselves into believing they were smarter than they were. There may be benefits from doing this—confidence, satisfaction, or more easily gaining the trust of others—but there are also disadvantages. Whenever circumstances change and you need to accurately predict how well you’ll do, it can cost to believe you’re better than you are.
        That self-deception has its costs has some interesting implications. Morally, most of us would say that self-deception is wrong. But aside from whether self-deception is undesirable, we should expect it to be present in all of us to some degree (because of the benefits), but to be limited as well (because of the costs).
        Self-deception isn't something that is always better in larger doses—there must be an amount of it for which the benefits outweigh the costs, most of the time. We’re probably all self-deceiving to some degree. The irony being, because it is self-deception, we can’t know how often.

Which of the following is true about the first experiment?（ ）

It was to see how intelligence affected the results.

All the students with the answers cheated on the test.

The answers were put at the bottom of the test paper by mistake.

The group with the answers got higher scores on average on the first test.

本题考查第一组实验的内容。

根据题干中的first experiment回文定位到第三段第二句话：Collectively, the group that had access to the answers performed better on the tests than participants who didn’t一even though both groups of participants were selected at random from students at the same university, so were, on average, of similar ability.意思为”总体而言，能够获得答案的那组人在测试中的表现要好于没有获得答案的参与者一尽管两组参与者都是从同一所大学的学生中随机挑选出来的，但平均而言，他们的能力相似。“因此D选项表达正确。故选D。

A选项测试是看智商对结果的影响（错误）。原文语境为看他们能否诱惑不看答案，即诚实度测试。B选项所有有答案的学生都在考试中作弊（错误）。C选项答案是不小心印在试卷底部的（错误），答案是实验设计者故意印在试卷上的。