Foreign-Language Effect

The foreign-language effect is the finding that people reasoning and making decisions in a language other than their native tongue tend to think more deliberately and less emotionally than they do in their native language, which changes the choices they make. Boaz Keysar, Sayuri Hayakawa and Sun Gyu An reported in a 2012 study, titled The Foreign-Language Effect: Thinking in a Foreign Tongue Reduces Decision Biases, that participants working in a foreign language showed reduced loss aversion and were less swayed by how a choice was framed, and gave more consistently utilitarian answers to moral dilemmas than participants using their native language. The proposed explanation is that a foreign language creates greater psychological and emotional distance from a decision, engaging more careful, deliberate reasoning and dampening the automatic emotional reactions that a native language triggers more readily. The effect has been discussed as relevant to bilingual decision-making in medicine, law, business and everyday moral judgment.