Folium: We think More Rationally in a Foreign Language via BPS
Folium: We think More Rationally in a Foreign Language via BPS
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There is a psychology of language that is the study of the psychological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend and produce language. There have been many studies done on bilingual students that has reported on that people are immune to two key biases when they think in their second language. The language we use affects the decisions we make. To study how language affects reasoning, University of Chicago psychologists looked at a well-known phenomenon: people are more risk-averse when an impersonal decision is presented in terms of a potential gain than when it is framed as a potential loss even when the outcomes are equivalent and the participants made more rational decisions when money-related choices were posed in a foreign language than in their native tongue.
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[“People who routinely make decisions in a foreign language rather than their native tongue might be less biased in their savings, investment, and retirement decisions, as a result of reduced myopic loss aversion,”] – BPS
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Personally, whenever I speak Spanish, I tend to think in a more calm and focused way, so in that case I would have to agree what it says in the study published online in April in Psychological Science. Native English speakers who had learned Japanese, native Korean speakers who had learned English and native English speakers studying French in Paris all reacted to the expected bias when they encountered the question in their native tongue. But when they spoke their second language, the bias disappeared. A second set of experiments tested another cognitive bias. Again, the foreign language affected their ideas and reactions to the biased of being more rational.
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There are other benefits to bilingualism too!
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“When people use a foreign language, their decisions tend to be less biased, more analytic, more systematic, because the foreign language provides psychological distance,” lead psychologist Boaz Keysar suggests. Boaz Keysar is the Chair of the Cognition Program at the University of Chicago, and broadly researches communication, negotiation, and decision making. Cognitive biases are rooted in emotional reactions, and thinking in a foreign language helps us disconnect from these emotions and make decisions in a more economically rational way. Boaz Keysar and his team showed that dozens of native English speakers showed the typical framing effect when they completed the task in English, but not when they completed the task in their second language. So these studies suggest that those who speak a second language think more rationally in that language more than their native tongue.
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The results from the studies done allow psychologists to better understand the way people think. More generally, the researchers said the findings could have ramifications for real life. “People who routinely make decisions in a foreign language rather than their native tongue might be less biased in their savings, investment, and retirement decisions, as a result of reduced myopic loss aversion,” they concluded. Knowing a second language, according to this research is extremely beneficial.
Julie Martin
LEAF Editor & Contributor
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