8 ms·

How Morality Changes in a Foreign Language

70 points by bangda 10y ago

throwanem 10y ago
Dr. Sapir, Mr. Whorf, please call your offices...
- jnordwick 10y ago
  Only the absolute weakest forms of Sapir-Whorf anymore. It's pretty much a dead idea. The answer to this, if it isn't yet another social psych study that can't be reproduced, probably more lies in the time the people took to think about the problem or something else that they didn't measure. The absolute crazy part is that they want to say a foreign language changes your morality. That should be a huge warning sign that something is off, and something isn't being accounted for. The foreign language sounds incidental to the study and there seems to be a deeper meaning. I really wished they would have timed the people, and they had a control group that was forced read the problem or thing about before answering. Would reading have caused a shift in morality? How about reading in a difficult to read font? I'm sure the would have probably seen these also show interesting results.
jondubois 10y ago
Regarding the Trolley problem, it doesn't make sense to push someone off a bridge in order to save 5 people, this is very different from just flicking a switch for several reasons: - There is a chance that this plan might fail and 6 people would get killed instead of 5. - Maybe there is a reason why the 5 people are tied to train tracks - Honest people don't usually end up like this - Maybe they're in the mafia and their deaths would be an expected consequence of their high-risk criminal lifestyle. On the other hand, the guy standing on the bridge is more likely to be a regular person who did nothing wrong. - You would go to jail for manslaughter. - You would psychologically damage yourself by pushing the person off a bridge. - Maybe you have an undiagnosed case of schizophrenia and the 5 people on the tracks are not real. The odds of it being an illusion (and that you are crazy) are probably higher than it being real - It's quite arrogant to trust your own senses (to the point of killing someone) when you're confronted with such an incredibly unlikely situation.
- kim031 10y ago
  > - You would psychologically damage yourself by pushing the person off a bridge. This. This response is exactly what the experimenters need, to differentiate between a 'normal' person and a psychopath.
- ryb73 10y ago
  Sure, one can think of clever ways to "break" the question, but it undermines the asker's intent. The trolley problem is really only interesting if you play by a set of rigid rules (which, to be fair, are generally not explicitly mentioned).
  - waqf 10y ago
    The purpose of the trolley problem is precisely to explore the limits of a set of rules (in this case, the "rule" that fewer people dying is better than more, vs the "rule" that you shouldn't actively harm a given person). It's legitimate to argue in response that those limits won't ever be tested in the real world, and if the problem-poser thinks otherwise then it's their responsibility to come up with a question that can't be gamed. By contrast, once one picks a set of "rigid rules" as you advocate, then the answer is predetermined and not interesting.
    - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
      The whole problem is that you don't know where the "rules" came from in the first place, which means the thought-experiment doesn't reveal much about how to generate fresh responses to novel situations.
    - stale2002 10y ago
      Spherical cows don't exist in the real world either. Does that make all high school physics questions "useless" because they don't exist in the real world? Sometime you have to solve the basic question before going on to the more complicated questions.
      - deleted 10y ago
known 10y ago
"How Morality Changes in a Foreign Language" is the better title
johnnyn2o 10y ago
Simple.. throwing a switch, the single bystander has a chance to avoid the trolley, Pushing someone to their death is murder. Just yell at the other five to move. Dumb question. Morality doesn't change, only your perception.
gcoda 10y ago
Thinking in a Foreign Language Makes Decisions More Rational https://www.wired.com/2012/04/language-and-bias/ https://www.wired.com/2012/04/language-and-bias/
thyrsus 10y ago
The article infers that "the greatest good for the greatest number" morality is the least likely to be dropped under the stress of operating in a second language (one catalog of the other components is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_foundations_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_foundations_theory). Stipulating that, should you make the same choice in the absence of stress?
MandieD 10y ago
I definitely make "cooler" judgments in situations where I'm speaking German (learned while living here as a young adult) than I do in my native English. I also have never lost my temper in a German conversation like I occasionally do in English, but have gotten good and angry after, once I had some time to think about what was said. So I see how discussing an issue in one's second language could affect how likely someone is to use utilitarian morality. It's also harder to think about intent the same way in a second language you can work in, but that you weren't raised in, so that might be part of why the result of actions appeared to matter more than their motivations to people reading about the situations in their second languages.
- jnordwick 10y ago
  That's probably because you are forced to slow down and respond less erratically since more brain power is going to speaking so less can be made in snap judgements. I know I have a hard time getting excitedly angry when "speaking" (more like stumbling) in a second language because I can't just shout something out. I have to take more time figuring out what I'm saying.
  - Broken_Hippo 10y ago
    That is completely true - I have to think about what I say more. And I don't have so much practice speaking angrily in my second language at all, actually. Practically speaking, those aren't the words I'm using often. I even find it much harder to speak ill about someone else, just because those words haven't been nearly as important to me.
fenomas 10y ago
That trolley problem has always seemed fundamentally dishonest to me. It sets out to present two scenarios that are somehow morally equivalent, but they're only equivalent for for people who magically know the outcomes of their actions. That is, "would you push a fat guy in front of a trolley if you knew it would save five lives?" isn't a question that's relevant to human ethics. It would need to be "would you push a fat in front of a trolley because you thought it would save five lives" - and, implicitly, then bear the responsibility for your action if you were wrong?
- mjburgess 10y ago
  That's a perfectly reasonable response within the Trolly-Problem debate. It isn't dishonest because it is there to analyse precisely these kinds of concerns.
  - jnordwick 10y ago
    It's highly problematic like many other questions and studies like these since it is so open to interpretation (who are the people, how old are they, how do I know the train will switch tracks, etc...), but more of a problem it is too likely for study participants to give the answer they thing the researcher wants. How many psych studies have gone down in flames lately from reproducibility attempts from this same thing? There have been almost entire sections of psych taken down and beaten lately.
- lettergram 10y ago
  My response to the trolley problem always thrown off my philosophy friends/professors. I always asked why this was a question at all? To me, all ethics and morals are broken down to how we live with ourselves and perceive ourselves. Because Everyone made a choice to be in the given position and assuming no one I care about is on the trolley I have no reason to effect the system. Sure, saving five people's lives may help some people sleep at night, but killing another also won't help. For me, I wouldn't be able to sleep at night if I killed someone. Not taking action ensures I have done nothing. Meaning, it would be as if I'm not there, thus everyone is going to die by their own choices not mine. I am not inflicting my will on others, therefore I am not killing anyone, and I cannot make a wrong decision. As you pointed out, you can't know what your actions will do. For some reason this always makes everyone call me immoral though...
thr0waway1239 10y ago
Perhaps I missed it, but I feel like an important aspect is being left out of this article. For the average person, English is not their native language. [1] However, it is also becoming the 'lingua franca' of science and the leading edge of technology - that is, even if it is only a second language, people are spending a lot of time thinking in it. As someone who is not a native English speaker, I am very often lost for words when expressing certain ideas in my own mother tongue (someone will helpfully point out that it is possible I didn't learn my own language very well, which might also be true), especially when communicating concepts like privacy and such. This leads to a gap - the number of ideas and concepts that can be expressed by the average person in their native language is less than the number of ideas and concepts that can be expressed in a non-native language, assuming the non-native language is English. Correspondingly, it is possible your brain is just that little bit more open and receptive to ideas, and sort of turns down its emotional reaction a little bit. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of...
- int_19h 10y ago
  I get what you're saying, but the reverse is also true - other languages have concepts that don't translate nicely (or at all) to English. I'm not sure it is easy to quantify, between two languages, which one has means to express more ideas and concepts. And, of course, having more ideas and concepts doesn't necessarily translate to more open-mindedness, or being more receptive. For example, one of those concepts could be extreme emotional-level xenophobia. Or, say, loss of face that is only preventable by extreme measures (such as suicide or "honor killing").
  - thr0waway1239 10y ago
    I completely agree with the first statement. I am not so sure about the second one. Learning ideas and concepts is a sort of additive process - hopefully learning one will not subtract away something you already had. Having been exposed to an idea which cannot be expressed in English now gives your brain multiple interpretations to choose from - that is, something which might be considered a real mistake in one culture (e.g. society judging individualism) might be more acceptable to you if you were a part of another culture (e.g. where society did judge individualism but also compensated by being more supportive of failure in general without creating indirect social safety nets which can be interpreted as one generation stealing the others' wealth). The concept of suicide, for example, is a good example of learning a bad idea, but it should hopefully be balanced by the other ideas you have learnt too.

70 points by bangda 10y ago

throwanem 10y ago

Dr. Sapir, Mr. Whorf, please call your offices...

jnordwick 10y ago
Only the absolute weakest forms of Sapir-Whorf anymore. It's pretty much a dead idea. The answer to this, if it isn't yet another social psych study that can't be reproduced, probably more lies in the time the people took to think about the problem or something else that they didn't measure. The absolute crazy part is that they want to say a foreign language changes your morality. That should be a huge warning sign that something is off, and something isn't being accounted for. The foreign language sounds incidental to the study and there seems to be a deeper meaning. I really wished they would have timed the people, and they had a control group that was forced read the problem or thing about before answering. Would reading have caused a shift in morality? How about reading in a difficult to read font? I'm sure the would have probably seen these also show interesting results.

jondubois 10y ago

Regarding the Trolley problem, it doesn't make sense to push someone off a bridge in order to save 5 people, this is very different from just flicking a switch for several reasons: - There is a chance that this plan might fail and 6 people would get killed instead of 5. - Maybe there is a reason why the 5 people are tied to train tracks - Honest people don't usually end up like this - Maybe they're in the mafia and their deaths would be an expected consequence of their high-risk criminal lifestyle. On the other hand, the guy standing on the bridge is more likely to be a regular person who did nothing wrong. - You would go to jail for manslaughter. - You would psychologically damage yourself by pushing the person off a bridge. - Maybe you have an undiagnosed case of schizophrenia and the 5 people on the tracks are not real. The odds of it being an illusion (and that you are crazy) are probably higher than it being real - It's quite arrogant to trust your own senses (to the point of killing someone) when you're confronted with such an incredibly unlikely situation.

kim031 10y ago
> - You would psychologically damage yourself by pushing the person off a bridge. This. This response is exactly what the experimenters need, to differentiate between a 'normal' person and a psychopath.
ryb73 10y ago
Sure, one can think of clever ways to "break" the question, but it undermines the asker's intent. The trolley problem is really only interesting if you play by a set of rigid rules (which, to be fair, are generally not explicitly mentioned).
- waqf 10y ago
  The purpose of the trolley problem is precisely to explore the limits of a set of rules (in this case, the "rule" that fewer people dying is better than more, vs the "rule" that you shouldn't actively harm a given person). It's legitimate to argue in response that those limits won't ever be tested in the real world, and if the problem-poser thinks otherwise then it's their responsibility to come up with a question that can't be gamed. By contrast, once one picks a set of "rigid rules" as you advocate, then the answer is predetermined and not interesting.
  - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
    The whole problem is that you don't know where the "rules" came from in the first place, which means the thought-experiment doesn't reveal much about how to generate fresh responses to novel situations.
  - stale2002 10y ago
    Spherical cows don't exist in the real world either. Does that make all high school physics questions "useless" because they don't exist in the real world? Sometime you have to solve the basic question before going on to the more complicated questions.
    - deleted 10y ago

known 10y ago

"How Morality Changes in a Foreign Language" is the better title

johnnyn2o 10y ago

Simple.. throwing a switch, the single bystander has a chance to avoid the trolley, Pushing someone to their death is murder. Just yell at the other five to move. Dumb question. Morality doesn't change, only your perception.

gcoda 10y ago

Thinking in a Foreign Language Makes Decisions More Rational https://www.wired.com/2012/04/language-and-bias/ https://www.wired.com/2012/04/language-and-bias/

thyrsus 10y ago

The article infers that "the greatest good for the greatest number" morality is the least likely to be dropped under the stress of operating in a second language (one catalog of the other components is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_foundations_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_foundations_theory). Stipulating that, should you make the same choice in the absence of stress?

MandieD 10y ago

I definitely make "cooler" judgments in situations where I'm speaking German (learned while living here as a young adult) than I do in my native English. I also have never lost my temper in a German conversation like I occasionally do in English, but have gotten good and angry after, once I had some time to think about what was said. So I see how discussing an issue in one's second language could affect how likely someone is to use utilitarian morality. It's also harder to think about intent the same way in a second language you can work in, but that you weren't raised in, so that might be part of why the result of actions appeared to matter more than their motivations to people reading about the situations in their second languages.

jnordwick 10y ago
That's probably because you are forced to slow down and respond less erratically since more brain power is going to speaking so less can be made in snap judgements. I know I have a hard time getting excitedly angry when "speaking" (more like stumbling) in a second language because I can't just shout something out. I have to take more time figuring out what I'm saying.
- Broken_Hippo 10y ago
  That is completely true - I have to think about what I say more. And I don't have so much practice speaking angrily in my second language at all, actually. Practically speaking, those aren't the words I'm using often. I even find it much harder to speak ill about someone else, just because those words haven't been nearly as important to me.

fenomas 10y ago

That trolley problem has always seemed fundamentally dishonest to me. It sets out to present two scenarios that are somehow morally equivalent, but they're only equivalent for for people who magically know the outcomes of their actions. That is, "would you push a fat guy in front of a trolley if you knew it would save five lives?" isn't a question that's relevant to human ethics. It would need to be "would you push a fat in front of a trolley because you thought it would save five lives" - and, implicitly, then bear the responsibility for your action if you were wrong?

mjburgess 10y ago
That's a perfectly reasonable response within the Trolly-Problem debate. It isn't dishonest because it is there to analyse precisely these kinds of concerns.
- jnordwick 10y ago
  It's highly problematic like many other questions and studies like these since it is so open to interpretation (who are the people, how old are they, how do I know the train will switch tracks, etc...), but more of a problem it is too likely for study participants to give the answer they thing the researcher wants. How many psych studies have gone down in flames lately from reproducibility attempts from this same thing? There have been almost entire sections of psych taken down and beaten lately.
lettergram 10y ago
My response to the trolley problem always thrown off my philosophy friends/professors. I always asked why this was a question at all? To me, all ethics and morals are broken down to how we live with ourselves and perceive ourselves. Because Everyone made a choice to be in the given position and assuming no one I care about is on the trolley I have no reason to effect the system. Sure, saving five people's lives may help some people sleep at night, but killing another also won't help. For me, I wouldn't be able to sleep at night if I killed someone. Not taking action ensures I have done nothing. Meaning, it would be as if I'm not there, thus everyone is going to die by their own choices not mine. I am not inflicting my will on others, therefore I am not killing anyone, and I cannot make a wrong decision. As you pointed out, you can't know what your actions will do. For some reason this always makes everyone call me immoral though...

thr0waway1239 10y ago

Perhaps I missed it, but I feel like an important aspect is being left out of this article. For the average person, English is not their native language. [1] However, it is also becoming the 'lingua franca' of science and the leading edge of technology - that is, even if it is only a second language, people are spending a lot of time thinking in it. As someone who is not a native English speaker, I am very often lost for words when expressing certain ideas in my own mother tongue (someone will helpfully point out that it is possible I didn't learn my own language very well, which might also be true), especially when communicating concepts like privacy and such. This leads to a gap - the number of ideas and concepts that can be expressed by the average person in their native language is less than the number of ideas and concepts that can be expressed in a non-native language, assuming the non-native language is English. Correspondingly, it is possible your brain is just that little bit more open and receptive to ideas, and sort of turns down its emotional reaction a little bit. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of...

int_19h 10y ago
I get what you're saying, but the reverse is also true - other languages have concepts that don't translate nicely (or at all) to English. I'm not sure it is easy to quantify, between two languages, which one has means to express more ideas and concepts. And, of course, having more ideas and concepts doesn't necessarily translate to more open-mindedness, or being more receptive. For example, one of those concepts could be extreme emotional-level xenophobia. Or, say, loss of face that is only preventable by extreme measures (such as suicide or "honor killing").
- thr0waway1239 10y ago
  I completely agree with the first statement. I am not so sure about the second one. Learning ideas and concepts is a sort of additive process - hopefully learning one will not subtract away something you already had. Having been exposed to an idea which cannot be expressed in English now gives your brain multiple interpretations to choose from - that is, something which might be considered a real mistake in one culture (e.g. society judging individualism) might be more acceptable to you if you were a part of another culture (e.g. where society did judge individualism but also compensated by being more supportive of failure in general without creating indirect social safety nets which can be interpreted as one generation stealing the others' wealth). The concept of suicide, for example, is a good example of learning a bad idea, but it should hopefully be balanced by the other ideas you have learnt too.