Learn a foreign language to reduce bias?

AShepard

Interesting new paper (anyone have a link to an ungated version). Abstract (emphasis added):

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.

Speakers of multiple languages: have you noticed a similar pattern in your own lives?

Interesting new paper (anyone have a link to an ungated version). Abstract (emphasis added):

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.

Speakers of multiple languages: have you noticed a similar pattern in your own lives?

As a trilingual, I would still advise against doing learning a newer language for the sole sake of gaining rationality skills. There are much better and cost-efficient ways to improve rationality besides learning a newer language, which would likely take years, or depending on the language, decades, to fully master.

To answer your question, strangely enough, now that this topic has been brought up, I do have a slight change in personality whenever I switch to a different language conversationally, although I might have to experiment further if it affects whether I am more or less rational.

I do have a slight change in personality whenever I switch to a different language conversationally

It also happens to me.

1SkyDK14y

... but honestly learning languages early on is a good investment for several other reasons. Not only for social and economical reasons, but also due to it becoming a lot harder to learn languages later on in life (please do correct me if this is a myth). If you on the other hand stay learning languages during your youth, becoming fluent in a language takes less and less time (at least according to my own experience and that of all of the polyglots I know). Also I'd say that being able to call on different aspects of your personality is a very valuable trait. If you combine the use of standard associations exercises (and hence have an above average control of your emotional state) with keying different associational patterns to different languages you'll achieve a capacity for holistic problem solving and idea generation that I'd expect to be soaring high above the average levels.

2Viliam_Bur14y

It would be interesting to find out how the bias-reducing effect is related to the mastery of the language. I guess that fully mastering the language is not necessary for this effect, and even could reduce it. My model is that by speaking in a foreign language we have to pay more attention to our thoughts, and we have to make more things explicit. Thus it is more difficult for some biases to be unnoticed. Fully mastering the language would make the biases easier too. (I am not sure about the cost-efficiency, because I don't know how strong is the effect, and how strong are effects of alternative methods. If the effect is strong, perhaps spending two weeks learning Esperanto using Anki would be worth doing. But I guess the effect is not very strong.)

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Learn a foreign language to reduce bias?

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Learn a foreign language to reduce bias?

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