Foreign Language Effect: How Thinking In L2 Slowly Turns You Into S**T

You are standing on a footbridge, enjoying the stunning view of a railroad running below. Suddenly, you notice a train approaching, and a group of absentminded retirees-hikers is walking along the track. They are in imminent danger, and unless you intervene, they will be killed. In desperation, you look around and realize that the only way to save these five innocent lives is to push the heavy man next to you, who is smoking, off the bridge in front of the train. This sacrifice would stop the train and save the hikers.

So, the question is: Would you sacrifice one life to save five?

Well, it depends on whether English is your first or second language, and it has something to do with the so-called foreign language effect.

What is the foreign language effect?

This thought-provoking moral challenge (you're welcome) was presented by a team of American psychologists to seven hundred bilingual individuals. Their task was to make a choice: either kill one person to save five lives or choose not to intervene and let the five people die.

The rational choice here is to sacrifice one life to save five. However, the idea of being involved in a murder is emotionally distressing, so it's not surprising that people generally prefer the less logical option of non-intervention. This preference is influenced by considerations of individual rights and the nature of destiny, among other factors.

So, what's the trick?

The trick lies in whether the bilingual individuals read the dilemma in their native tongue or in their second language.

The results were remarkable.

Only 20% of those who read the question in their native language chose the pragmatic option of sacrificing one life. However, this number increased to 33% (more than half) when bilinguals solved the dilemma in a foreign language.

What happened?

The foreign language effect happened.

How does the foreign language effect influence your morality?

In the original article, the psychologists proposed a couple of explanations for these surprising results.

First, let's reject the idea that second language learners didn't fully understand the question due to low proficiency in their second language. That's not true; everyone passed the comprehension test. Nor did they reply randomly. It's a peer-reviewed article, after all.

So, we have two equally plausible theories to explain the foreign language effect.

Theory #1: The use of a foreign language makes you less sensitive.

If you speak a second language, you may have noticed an interesting phenomenon.

Foreign words don't affect you as strongly. Swear words sound like childish allegations, and expressions of attraction, which should theoretically evoke a strong emotional response, only scratch the surface.

Emotions are significantly affected by the use of a second language because fully processing foreign words requires additional cognitive resources. It may sound ridiculous, but the idea of pushing a man off a bridge doesn't affect you as much when considered in a second language.

Therefore, the foreign language effect reduces impulsive reactivity, inhibits emotional processing, and makes you a more rational, cold-blooded, and utilitarian person.

Theory #2: The use of a foreign language promotes deeper thinking.

In his book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” Daniel Kahneman argues that decision-making is essentially a game of two players. Namely, it involves your immediate intuitive system that fights for resources with a more systematic, less automatic, and generally highly deliberate outcome calculator. It takes some time to activate the latter, but it usually leads to a logical and rational answer favoring the greater good.

From this, you can derive yet another explanation of the foreign language effect. The preference for a more rational, utilitarian choice could be the result of the slow logical system activated in your brain. Since the use of a second language requires higher cognitive effort, bilinguals tend to slow down and consider their options more deliberately.

Both theories have something to offer. And I know that you would prefer to think that the reason for your "rational" choices is just a more deliberate cognitive processing.

But no.

The foreign language effect and emotional decision-making

The sad reality is that the second language shamelessly and ruthlessly inhibits your emotional response.

This conclusion comes from another experiment that explored the foreign language effect on decision biases in the consideration of risk. In that study, participants were given $15 and offered the opportunity to bet on coin flips. Each round, they could either keep $1 or gamble it. If they guessed correctly, they received $1.5; if they were wrong, they lost their $1 bet. From a scientific perspective, the game had a positive expected value. However, due to our human nature, the automatic "loss aversion" reaction tends to kick in and prevent individuals from taking the bet.

And everything worked just fine with those who used their mother tongue. But guess what? Second language speakers didn't react the same way! Instead, they tended to seek risk and make more bets when playing the game in a foreign language.

The problem is that this cannot be attributed to a higher cognitive load. The logic is as follows: if the second language were to overload the cognitive system, it would cause individuals to rely more on the intuitive system, which automatically induces loss aversion. Consequently, participants would prefer to keep their $15 rather than gamble it away. In reality, however, the opposite happened. Second language users tended to take the risk if a positive outcome was expected in the long run.

Psychologists concluded that decisions made in a second language are not as emotional as those made in the native language for a simple reason: you simply don't feel the same way. Or, to borrow a quote from the same article:

“In general, then, decision biases that are rooted in an emotional reaction should be less manifest with a foreign language than with a native language.”

Boaz Keysar, Sayuri L. Hayakawa and Sun Gyu An, “The Foreign-Language Effect: Thinking in a Foreign Tongue Reduces Decision Biases”

Use the foreign language effect to your advantage

So, here you are.

The fact of thinking in another language affects your decision-making and moral judgments. It also eliminates the framing effect, reduces loss aversion, and makes you relatively numb to expressions of love, hate, and other human emotions. Did you freak out yet?

Relax, it's not always going to be this way. The foreign language effect tends to fade in highly proficient second language learners. So the more fluent you become in your L2, the more you think and feel like a native speaker. And as you live your life in a second language, the psychological distance shrinks, and you become—once again—a biased and irrational thinker.

Welcome back.

At this point, it is useful to stop and think about how you can consciously use the foreign language effect to your own benefit. Being a pragmatic decision-maker may not look pretty when you have to kill somebody (for the greater good, once again). But it will certainly do you a favor when you have to make important long-term decisions. So, considering your employment options, breakups, and financial decisions in Italian, Spanish, or French may actually increase your chances of making a good choice.