阅读理解 As he applied sunscreen to his young daughter's face, Dara O'Rourke, a professor of environmental and labor policy at the University of California, Berkeley, found himself wondering if the lotion(霜) was safe. He realized there was no readily available answer. The result—two years, a team of chemists, lots of testing and venture capital(风险投资) later—is GoodGuide. com. Launched in 2008, this is a website with a smart phone app that rates 140, 000 consumer products (only in America) according to their safety, environmental sustainability and the ethics of the firms that make them. Now GoodGuide has created a new “purchase analyzer” app designed to inform consumers not just about the values attached to products, but also about whether they are the virtuous(有信誉的) shoppers they say they want to be.
Using the new app requires selecting a series of characteristics, which range from whether the user favours organic products to buying only from firms with a good human-rights record. Consumers then scan the bar code on a product with the camera in their smart phones. The app identifies it and checks in a database to score it. Much therefore depends on the quality of the data, which GoodGuide gathers from various sources, including government reports, scientific studies, and research by its own staff. If the product scores badly, the app will recommend an alternative item which is rated more highly. The app also tracks a consumer's purchases to see how well he lives up to his selected values, giving a sort of personal virtue rating.
So far, GoodGuide has mostly been used by shoppers who are keen to know about any issues connected with products they buy. They are mothers concerned about a child's health, older people facing a chronic(慢性的) illness or supporters of a cause, such as animal rights. The hope behind the app is that the idea of finding out about a product's background will become the mainstream.
Consumers rarely change their buying habits, even when provided with scientific and other data, says Mr O'Rourke. So he has drawn on insights from behavioral economics, which show shoppers can be greatly influenced by peer pressure and by information passed on to them by people they know. The app tries to take advantage of these pressures. The virtue rating will inform consumers how well they are doing according to the values they espouse(拥护). That measurement encourages them to do better. Soon, the rating will be able to be shared with others on social media sites such as Facebook, which could inspire a shopper to consume more thoughtfully.