Bilingualism can affect your choices
Knowing another language opens opportunities, but it also has unintended consequences
Young adults don’t always make great decisions. I myself did stupid things, which comes as a shock to my kids and husband, who know me as pretty, well, boring. Was my personality more reckless back then? Or could it have been because I lived much of life in a second language: French?
Knowing another language broadens your opportunities: the people you can talk to, the items you can read, the films you can watch, the countries you can comfortably communicate in. But studies suggest that it can also have unintended consequences when it comes to decision-making.
To begin with an extreme example, consider this: If you had to kill one person to save five other people, would you do it?
If I asked you in your native language, you would probably be pretty reluctant to push that one person off a bridge. (In a 2014 study of 725 undergraduate students who spoke two languages, 18 per cent said they would do it.) If you were bilingual and I asked you in your other language, you might be much more willing. (According to the study, 44 per cent would do so.)
“The decision to sacrifice the person is often thought to be driven by a more controlled, deliberative process,” says Sayuri Hayakawa, an assistant professor in the Bilingualism and Psycholinguistics Research Group at Northwestern University and co-author of the study. Logically, it seems better to save five people than one.
“It’s basically emotionally aversive for you to go up to a person and physically push them off, more emotionally aversive than just not doing anything and letting five people die,” Hayakawa says. “And so, the idea is that using a foreign language dampens that aversive reaction, therefore allowing you to consider the more utilitarian cost-benefit analysis of ‘five lives is better than one.’”
More reason in secondary language
In other words, you probably use more reason in your secondary language. In your original one, you probably use more heart.
“There’s still quite a bit of mystery in terms of exactly what it is that’s going on with the foreign language,” Hayakawa says. It could be that you’re tied up in processing the lesser-known words and phrases, which makes you “slow down and consider things a bit more carefully,” she says. However, “the main explanation so far is that using a foreign language just doesn’t have the same kind of emotional resonance that your native tongue does.”
This may come down to the learning method. Chances are good that you’ve lived a lifetime of rich experiences using your native language. Chances are you learnt the other language somewhat later in life, maybe in a classroom.
“When language is learnt and used in an emotional context, the emotional resonances accrue to the language,” says Catherine Caldwell-Harris, an associate professor of psychology at Boston University and author of various papers on the effects of foreign languages.
1,475 surveyed in study that found participants were less likely to cheat at a dice game in a foreign language
On the flip side, a foreign language probably hasn’t had an opportunity to gain this emotional impact. Caldwell-Harris co-authored another study, currently under peer review, that posed ethical dilemmas to 52 university students in Turkey who spoke English and Turkish, and another 201 for comparison who only spoke Turkish. For example, say you worked for a pharmaceutical company that developed a drug that could make a lot of money but had potentially life-threatening side effects. Would you offer it to the public anyway?
In a native language, more people said they would be ethical and not sell it. In a foreign language, more said they would. Caldwell-Harris deduces this is because the foreign-language participants did not feel emotions that would censor them from doing the unethical thing.
In a different study of 1,475 people, mostly university students, co-authored by Hayakawa, participants were less likely to cheat at a dice game in a foreign language, thereby “winning” less money. Here, the foreign-language speakers did the more ethical thing, which seems contradictory: If a foreign language makes you less emotional, wouldn’t you have a greater tendency to cheat during a dice game?
Although not involved in the dice experiment, Caldwell-Harris has given it much thought and explains it this way: In cases where no one is harmed, such as a dice game in a scientific study — what’s a little cash to a few researchers? — there’s a natural temptation to cheat. But in the foreign language, the participants didn’t feel the emotions that, in this case, would cause them to cheat.
Language can also make advertising more or less effective, depending on whether you want the item to have an emotional tug (use the native language) or be thought about with care (use the non-native one), based on a study that looked at more than 380 university students. “We’re still understanding it,” Hayakawa says.
And if you speak more than one language, should you alter your behaviour to use a specific one in a specific context? Unless you’re choosing to experiment, Caldwell-Harris says no. “There are so many different reasons why you’re using one language versus another that are important and valid. I wouldn’t want to disrupt any of that.”