Foreign Language Impacts Decision Making

If you could save the lives of five people by pushing another bystander in front of a train to his death, would you do it? And should it make any difference if that choice is presented in a language you speak, but isn’t your native tongue? Psychologists at the University of Chicago found in past research that people facing such a dilemma while communicating in a foreign language are far more willing to sacrifice the bystander than those using their native tongue. “Until now, we and others have described how using a foreign language affects the way that we think,” said Boaz Keysar, the UChicago psychology professor in whose lab the research was conducted. “We always had explanations, but they were not tested directly. This is really the first paper that explains why, with evidence.”  Through a series of experiments, Keysar and his colleagues explore whether the decision people make in the train dilemma is due to a reduction in the emotional aversion to breaking an ingrained taboo, an increase in deliberation thought to be associated with a utilitarian sense of maximizing the greater good or some combination of the two. “We discovered that people using a foreign language were not any more concerned with maximizing the greater good,” said lead author Sayuri Hayakawa, a UChicago doctoral student in psychology. “But rather, were less averse to violating the taboos that can interfere with making utility-maximizing choices.” The researchers, including Albert Costa and Joanna Corey from Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, propose that using a foreign language gives people some emotional distance and that allowed them to take the more utilitarian action. “I thought it was very surprising,” Keysar said. “My prediction was that we’d find that the difference is in how much they care about the common good. But it’s not that at all.” Studies from around the world suggest that using a foreign language makes people more utilitarian. Speaking a foreign language slows you down and requires that you concentrate to understand. Scientists have hypothesized that the result is a more deliberative frame of mind that makes the utilitarian benefit of saving five lives outweigh the aversion to pushing a man to his death. But Keysar’s own experience speaking a foreign language — English — gave him the sense that emotion was important. English just didn’t have the visceral resonance for him as his native Hebrew. It wasn’t as intimately connected to emotion, a feeling shared by many bilingual people and corroborated by numerous lab studies. “Your native language is acquired from your family, from your friends, from television,” Hayakawa said. “It becomes infused with all these emotions.” Foreign languages are often learned later in life in classrooms, and may not activate feelings, including aversive feelings, as strongly. The problem is that either the “more utilitarian” or the “less emotional” process would produce the same behavior. To help figure out which was actually responsible, the psychologists worked with David Tannenbaum, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business at the time of the research and now an assistant professor at the University of Utah. Tannenbaum is an expert at a technique called process dissociation, which allows researchers to tease out and measure the relative importance of different factors in a decision process. For the paper, the researchers did six separate studies with six different groups, including native speakers of English, German and Spanish. Each also spoke one of the other languages, so that all possible combinations were equally represented. Each person was randomly assigned to use either his or her native language or second language throughout the experiment.

-Source:www.sciencedaily.com  

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