In the coming months, Dutch people will cross the border en masse. In our best coal English, French or Italian, we struggle through all kinds of daily situations for a few weeks. Something I never thought about before: thinking and talking in another language can have a surprising influence on you.
More sensible in a foreign language
The psychologist Boaz Keysar published in 2012 a remarkable study. In a series of experiments, he and his colleagues found that people make more rational decisions when they have to think in another language.
How did that work? For example, researchers gave English-speaking students studying Spanish fifteen one-dollar bills. This allowed them to make bets. When they thought about this in English, the fear of losing the money prevailed, even though the bets were statistically in their favor. But when the researchers asked them to think in Spanish, they made the more rational choice to bet with their dollars.
In other experiments, the researchers presented similar dilemmas to people from different countries who had learned Japanese, French or English as a second language at school. The researchers kept seeing the same pattern: decisions in a foreign language were made less emotionally.
How is that possible? According to Keysar and his colleagues, thinking and talking in a language that is not your native language leads to more emotional distance. This makes you look at the world a little more intellectually. The researchers called this it Foreign Language Effect.
Keysar was not simply interested in this phenomenon. He grew up in Israel and moved to the US where he eventually became a professor at the University of Chicago. Even after 25 years of daily functioning in English, he noticed that speaking and listening in his native language, Hebrew, had a greater emotional impact on him.
Romantic in French
Other researchers, among others Aneta Pavlenko and Jean-Marc Dewaelehad been working for several years on exactly what Keysar personally experienced: how do you feel when you speak another language? Their findings are recognizable. This way you can feel more polite when expressing yourself in British English. Or more romantic if you speak French. This can also translate into different behavior: speaking in a different tone, more hand gestures or less eye contact.
However, according to the researchers, this is not only due to the language, but also due to the culture that accompanies that language. We have all kinds of associations with other countries and peoples and by speaking their language you make them active. In a reader survey that the magazine Our Language organized, participants wrote things like: “If you speak another language, you also ‘speak’ a different culture.”
Personal memories and context also play a role. If you speak a lot of English at work, you can feel more businesslike in that language. This is not only due to your associations with that language or your memories, but also due to the physical and social environment in which you speak English.
Psychologists call this whole phenomenon – thinking, feeling and acting differently due to a different language – Cultural Frame Switching. You temporarily switch to another world.
Multiple effects on decisions
Back to the Foreign Language Effect that I started with. Quite a bit has now been published in this area. A meta-analysis and a review study found the following patterns.
- Thinking and speaking in a language other than your native language leads to different choices. Especially in issues where emotion plays an important role. The effect probably arises because we think more distantly about choices and problems in a different language.
- When faced with moral dilemmas, we choose to speak more businesslike in a foreign language. This is evident from the well-known thought experiment in which you can push one person in front of an oncoming train to save five others who are working further along the track. You save four people net, but you are also involved in the death of one person. Those who do not think in their native language are more willing to accept such a sacrifice.
- In a foreign language we think less emotionally about all kinds of things. Fear of loss decreases, we become less superstitious and gain a sharper eye for cause-and-effect relationships. We also look more at the content of information and less at the packaging.
- Language distance plays a role. The effect becomes stronger when the foreign language you use is less similar to your native language. How long you have been speaking that language seems to matter less.
- Important nuance: a lot of research has been done in unnatural test environments. It has not been sufficiently investigated whether the effects are equally strong in everyday life, where, in addition to language, all kinds of other stimuli influence your thinking, feeling and acting.
Practical
Thinking and talking in a language other than your mother tongue has all kinds of effects. It is quite possible that in work environments where the main language is English, people for whom this is their second language make slightly more detached decisions.
But it can also be useful. When you are faced with a difficult, emotional choice, it may help to think about it in another language.
And on holiday? I will try to conduct the upcoming discussions with my traveling companion about the correct cycle route around Lake Constance in German. Always see, whoever loves it.
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