While
at first glance it might seem irrational, researchers from the University of
Chicago have found that people who speak two languages tend to make more
rational decisions when thinking in their non-native tongue.
They came to this conclusion after conducting a
series of experiments, the results of which they have published in a paper in
the journal Psychological Science.
Intuitively, most people would assume that it
shouldn’t matter which language a person is thinking in when making a decision,
but the research team found just the opposite to be true, and they theorize
that it’s because when people think in a language that takes more effort, they
tend to be more analytical and less emotional when faced with making a choice.
To find out if their idea was sound, they conducted
several experiments.
In the first experiment, the team revisited the
famous experiment conducted by Daniel Kahneman where volunteers were given a
choice regarding whether to save a certain few from death, or try another
option that might save more lives, but was riskier.
In this case, the researchers asked 121 American
volunteers that had learned Japanese to choose between a cure for a disease
that could definitely cure a third of the victims of a plague, versus a cure
that had just a one third chance of curing all of the victims.
They found that almost eighty percent of those chose
the safe option when it was framed in English. The number dropped to just forty
seven percent when the question was framed in terms of losing lives rather than
saving them. When the question was posed in Japanese however, the safe option
was chosen around forty percent of the time regardless which way it was
phrased.
To make sure their results were sound, the team
conducted several variations on this experiment and found nearly identical
results.
Then, to look at things in another way, they set up
an experiment to test myopic aversion (focusing on a big gain instead of minor
losses) in volunteers when making decisions in a non-native language. In this
experiment, native Korean speaking volunteers who spoke English as a second
language were asked in Korean to make bets with potentially big gains and minor
losses.
They accepted the bets in fifty seven percent of the
trials, whereas when asked in English they made sixty seven percent of them,
indicating they found the bets more reasonable when thought about in a second
language.
The researchers then took the experiment out into
the real world, asking volunteers to make bets with very small sums of money
given to them and found virtually the same outcome.
Because of these results, the research team believes
their original assumptions were correct as it appears that people tend to
become more analytical when thinking in a foreign language and their
decision making tends to reflects that.
More
information: The Foreign-Language Effect: Thinking in a
Foreign Tongue Reduces Decision Biases, Psychological Science,
Published online before print April 18, 2012, doi:
10.1177/0956797611432178
Abstract
Would you make the same decisions in a foreign
language as you would in your native tongue? It may be intuitive that people
would make the same choices regardless of the language they are using, or that
the difficulty of using a foreign language would make decisions less
systematic. We discovered, however, that the opposite is true: Using a foreign
language reduces decision-making biases. Four experiments show that the framing
effect disappears when choices are presented in a foreign tongue. Whereas
people were risk averse for gains and risk seeking for losses when choices were
presented in their native tongue, they were not influenced by this framing
manipulation in a foreign language. Two additional experiments show that using
a foreign language reduces loss aversion, increasing the acceptance of both
hypothetical and real bets with positive expected value. We propose that these
effects arise because a foreign language provides greater cognitive and
emotional distance than a native tongue does.
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