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?

This is interesting because I find it counterintuitive. I would have thought that the tendency would be the opposite: that, for a given thought, expressing that thought in German (your native language) would tend to make it more sympathetic to you rather than less (all else being equal).

Data such as this may force me to reevaluate my predictions of the effect one might have on an audience by speaking to them in their native language.

The effect in question is actually attenuation through mediation: most people can attest to the fact that foreign swear words are not perceived as strongly as the native ones, even if the meaning and usage is identical. Having an intermediate step of translation reduces emotional impact. Not surprisingly, the effect wears off after living long enough in the new environment. This has little to do with framing.

16

Learn a foreign language to reduce bias?

16

16

16

Learn a foreign language to reduce bias?

16

16