Using a Foreign Tongue Can Clear Your Mind; Considering and discussing an emotionally freighted problem in a foreign tongue may help you make a more rational choice, research shows
April 1, 2014 Leave a comment
Foreign Tongue, Clearer Mind
DANIEL AKST
March 21, 2014 7:27 p.m. ET
Facing an emotionally freighted decision? If you speak a second language, you’re in luck. Considering and discussing the problem in a foreign tongue may help you decide more rationally.
In a new paper, scientists in Barcelona and Jerusalem report on a series of experiments in which bilingual volunteers made more rational decisions when using their second language. Participants in each experiment were split into two groups: One was given problems in their native language, and the other was presented with the same problems in their second language.Using the second language seemed to produce more rationality. For example, volunteers were presented with a hypothetical epidemic and asked to choose between a safe medicine guaranteed to spare some victims and a risky one that might save many more—or none at all. Half the volunteers had the choices presented in terms of lives saved, while the other half was offered the same choices framed in terms of how many would die. In combining the results with a second problem involving money, the scientists found that, among native language participants, the change in framing led to a 26% difference in choices between safe and risky. But among second language volunteers, there was only an 11% gap—a result closer to perfectly rational, since the odds of success among the choices weren’t changed by how they were framed.
That’s consistent with a celebrated 2012 study on this topic. But the new paper goes further, showing that volunteers presented with logical problems needing only concentration—and carrying little or no emotional punch—were about equally rational in either language. The “foreign language effect” didn’t apply.
Why the discrepancy? The emotional resonance of a problem seems to be reduced when we switch to another language. Previous research has found that discussing embarrassing subjects is easier in a foreign tongue, and skin conductance (a measure of sweat, and thus stress) is reduced when bilingual volunteers use emotional terms in their second language versus their first.
” ‘Piensa’ Twice: On the Foreign Language Effect in Decision Making,” Albert Costa, Alice Foucart, Inbal Arnon, Melina Aparici and Jose Apesteguia, Cognition (February)
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