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. 2014 Apr 23;9(4):e94842.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0094842. eCollection 2014.

Your morals depend on language

Albert Costa  1 , Alice Foucart  2 , Sayuri Hayakawa  3 , Melina Aparici  4 , Jose Apesteguia  5 , Joy Heafner  6 , Boaz Keysar  3
Affiliations

Your morals depend on language

Albert Costa et al. PLoS One. .

Abstract

Should you sacrifice one man to save five? Whatever your answer, it should not depend on whether you were asked the question in your native language or a foreign tongue so long as you understood the problem. And yet here we report evidence that people using a foreign language make substantially more utilitarian decisions when faced with such moral dilemmas. We argue that this stems from the reduced emotional response elicited by the foreign language, consequently reducing the impact of intuitive emotional concerns. In general, we suggest that the increased psychological distance of using a foreign language induces utilitarianism. This shows that moral judgments can be heavily affected by an orthogonal property to moral principles, and importantly, one that is relevant to hundreds of millions of individuals on a daily basis.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1. Percentage of utilitarian decisions (Experiment 2).
Percentage of utilitarian decisions for the two versions of the trolley problem in the native language condition and the foreign language condition.
Figure 2
Figure 2. Percentage of utilitarian decisions by language group (Experiment 2).
Percentage of utilitarian decisions for the two versions of the trolley problem in the native language condition and the foreign language condition, divided by native language group. Native Spanish speakers using Spanish (N = 200) or English (N = 197); native English speakers using English (N = 168) or Spanish (N = 160).
Figure 3
Figure 3. Percentage of utilitarian decisions by proficiency (Experiment 2).
Percentage of utilitarian decisions for the two versions of the trolley problem in the native language condition and the foreign language condition, divided by self-rated proficiency level.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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