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.
Someone here will probably know this better than I do (unfortunately :( ), but I believe there have been a series of studies done on the interplay between language and culture within certain countries--that certain constructions within the language allow for the development of differing types of cultural standards. The example that is coming to my mind is a language like German when compared to English. In English, you tend to be able to interrupt people more often, because you know where a sentence is going (You can go fuck--), whereas in German (I believe), since verbs come at the end (you yourself can go fuck--I know this isn't how it would be set up exactly), you can't interrupt nearly as much. Perhaps there is some ground in the idea that since learning languages forces you to subconsciously accept new modes of communicating, your way of looking at rational choice changes.
Of course, there's probably also an effect of simply needing to be more rigorous in a language that's not your own. My ability to be lazy in English is in part because I've spent a lot of time in this language and feel comfortable assuming things that I probably should not be. Whereas if I began to learn Mandarin, I would have to think about everything I say and do.
It would be difficult to separate cause and effect here. A culture where interrupting people was taboo in the first place might develop a similar syntax.
Speaking of rigor, I've come to love Spanish's subjunctive mood because I can inject doubt into a statement by changing a single syllable, whereas in English I need to mess about with cumbersome disclaimers to say the same thing. Also, if I'm making a subjective value judgment, I can clearly indicate that it's a fact about me, not a fact about the world.