5 ms·

Moral Judgments Depend on What Language We’re Speaking

lutusp 12y ago
A quote: "But it does help us predict and explain some moral choices." Predict, yes. Explain, no. Many such studies can predict that something is going to happen, that a correlation exists, but far fewer even attempt to offer a testable explanation, a way to turn a correlation into a cause-effect relationship. Science commentators as far back as Aristotle have described science as a way to craft explanations for observations, not merely describe the observations and their outcomes, which is that this study does.
wvh 12y ago
Interesting. I speak 6 languages and actively think in 3–4 of those, and I notice slight changes in my attitudes and behaviour depending on the active language in my head. It might be interesting to experiment and find out if not just the fact that it's a foreign language matters, but also the influence of the actual choice of language.
- emodendroket 12y ago
  That's a question that's already had a lot of attention devoted to it; look up the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis if you're interested.
- Aqueous 12y ago
  Wow, that's amazing. Did you learn all of those languages when you were a young child or did you learn them as you were getting older? Also, are you from a country that is bordered by a lot of other countries with native languages but doesn't have a native language of its own, like Switzerland?
simula67 12y ago
> in general people react less strongly to emotional expressions in a foreign language As a non-native English speaker, I wonder if this affects programming. Do English-speaking people find beautiful programs written in English more beautiful than others ? Anyone here programmed in both their mother tongue and one other language ?
- realusername 12y ago
  (French native speaker here). From the developers I know (and that is still my case to some extent) people refer to the keywords as their function rather than their meaning. So when you see a 'while' or a 'for' loop, you just interpret it as a loop regardless of the original meaning of the word, it's not English anymore, it's just code blocks. But I'm wondering how it's interpreted from the point of view of a native speaker.
  - chewxy 12y ago
    I interviewed some Chinese speaking programmers in preparation for my Kiwi Pycon talk, and I found that it's the same with them. It's just meaningless symbols to them, and it might as well be triangles and circles.
  - eatitraw 12y ago
    Russian native speaker here. I too never think of keywords as words in english language. As for function/variable/type/etc names and comments -- in Russia english is the standard. Russian is rarely used in comments, and using russian in code is frowned upon, so it (almost) never happens. > But I'm wondering how it's interpreted from the point of view of a native speaker. In Russia, we have company called 1C. One of the software products of this company is "1C: Enterprise". This product has some built-in language(for automatizing common accountant tasks or something like that). And keywords in this language are russian words. I've never programmed in this language. And code in it looks really horrible to me, to the point of being repulsive. Here is hello world program, in case anyone is interested: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Встроенный_язык_программирования_1С:Предприятие#.D0.9F.D1.80.D0.B8.D0.BC.D0.B5.D1.80_.D0.BF.D1.80.D0.BE.D0.B3.D1.80.D0.B0.D0.BC.D0.BC.D1.8B https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Встроенный_язык_программирован...
    - icebraining 12y ago
      We have a similar language here in Portugal (I believe it's a copy of Delphi) and I also find it extremely unpleasant to even read it.
  - 12y ago
infruset 12y ago
I wonder if this might not be something else. When you study a language in a classroom, you frequently engage in conversations on various topics, whose sole purpose is to make you practice much more than to actually have a well-thought conversation. As such (and here I speak from my own experience only), it is much more common to defend positions in which you don't actually believe, for the sake of argument or maybe just because it is easier to express than the subtleties you might find while thinking this over in your native language. I think it may be a good idea to try to only ask bilingual people (as opposed to people studying a language), or at least to test the above hypothesis before jumping to conclusions.
- pmr_ 12y ago
  Neither of the two languages a bilingual person speaks is considered foreign. Otherwise the person would not be bilingual. What would be the result of such a study? Keep in mind that in linguistics the difference between being a native speaker and having learned a language after the critical period is considered huge.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
    Right. Presumably for a bilingual person (where both languages are native), both languages they speak would have equal emotional impact.
  - barry-cotter 12y ago
    tl:dr It's fluency that impacts utilitarianism, not nativeness. Being able to communicate in two languages is not the same as being bilingual. The study in question suggests that thinking/communicating in a language that one is less than fluent in leads to more utilitarian decisions. The important thing here is fluency, not nativeness. I am fluent in German but I started learning it at 12. German is not a native language for me but I am fluent in it. As such the study suggests I should be equally utilitarian in it and English, my mother tongue. But my French and Mandarin are both quite bad so I should be more utilitarian in them because I must be more deliberate.
  - mercer 12y ago
Fice 12y ago
Pushing the large man is risky, you can't be 100% sure that it will work, and you can't be absolutely sure that five people will die if you don't do it. So it could be the willingness to take chances rather than the moral judgments.
- krisgee 12y ago
  In the context of the thought problem it works 100% of the time.
  - Fice 12y ago
    This is not an abstract logical problem. If you imagine yourself in the situation, it still feels like taking a risk, and this will influence your answer.
  - chroma 12y ago
    Even if I am confident that pushing a fat man onto some tracks will stop a trolley and save lives, it is much more likely that I have gone insane than that actually being the case. If this dilemma happened in real life, hopefully I would recognize my insanity and not push the fat man.
- Ensorceled 12y ago
  Normally uncooperative subjects like you are simply removed from the study :-)
GFischer 12y ago
I really liked being introduced to the Trolley Problem (especially the second formulation), I hadn't heard of it before. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem I spent more time than I should reading about several possible answers :) for example: http://philosophyfaculty.ucsd.edu/faculty/rarneson/Courses/thomsonTROLLEY.pdf http://philosophyfaculty.ucsd.edu/faculty/rarneson/Courses/t... some with a libertarian slant: http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2012/08/the-trolley-non-problem/ http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2012/08/the-trolley-non... http://freedomed.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-trolley-problem-is-bullshit.html http://freedomed.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-trolley-problem-is... Edit: where is a good place to read about and/or discuss interesting philosophical questions (preferrably not too far out :) )? Is it worth it to take a course on philosophy? (I've had short courses on "moral education" which were really awful).
- innguest 12y ago
  > where is a good place to read about and/or discuss interesting philosophical questions You should explore similar books to these: - The Pig That Wants to be Eaten - The Duck That Won the Lottery
  - GFischer 12y ago
    Thank you :) . Will do. Edit: I've also had a recommendation of watching Michael Sandel's videos: http://www.justiceharvard.org/ http://www.justiceharvard.org/
- bluecalm 12y ago
  I find the focus on doing nothing versus taking action (like in the 2nd paper you linked) misguided. Utilitarian principle has place in about every serious ethical system in the history. Doing nothing to avoid responsibility doesn't. You can't really use that argument without reference to cost of action and in Trolley Problem that is conveniently close to 0. There are other factors like ensuring that people feel safe (so they don't need to worry about doctors killing them to harvest the organs) and that we value life of healthy young person higher than older and sick. Assessing how far you can go using your personal utility over one of the population is another interesting problem (mother would be justified by most for choosing to kill 2 people instead of her own child in a Trolley Problem but would be condemned by choosing to kill a whole town). In the surgeon's example there is also cost of killing (surgeon as well as patient may feel bad about it or some other values in moral system of a person might be compromised like honor or keeping an oath) but it's again only matter of weighting the arguments not action vs inaction. It's easy to realize once you up the scale a bit: make it a scenario with whole town dying instead of young healthy person and you will get a consensus. From that you can see that action vs inaction isn't really what the problem is about.
thret 12y ago
When I first heard this problem, it was told in a heart-wrenching first-person 'this actually happened' way. Roughly as follows: "A man who worked the gears for a train line took his son to work. His son ran off to play and when it came time for him to divert a train (not doing so would cause a head on collision) he couldn't see his son, but he heard him cry out - he was stuck in the gears. Diverting the train would kill his son. So he does the right thing, sacrifices his son to save hundreds of lives." This was a Sunday School story, meant to illustrate how God So Loved The World that he sacrificed his son. So I've actually always unhesitatingly believed that the needs of the many out weigh the needs of the few, or the one. As an adult and upon deeper reflection, I find that this holds true for strangers, but if I am completely honest my life and the lives of those I hold dear are worth more to me than the lives of basically any number of strangers.
- GFischer 12y ago
  Hmm, I think that is a different problem (too many different variables). It involves the rights and obligations of a parent, for one. I also agree I might have chosen differently if it were my son.
- rayiner 12y ago
  As a parent, not only would I not hit the switch, I'd blame Congress for the passenger deaths for not funding modernization of the switching infrastructure.
  - philh 12y ago
    If blame is a meaningful thing to assign, I'm going to assign at least some of it to you for not watching your son, and quite a lot of it to you for not flipping the switch. I much prefer a world where you are sad and your son is dead, to a world where hundreds of people are dead, all their families are sad, and your son is alive. (That said, it's at least somewhat plausible that if I was in that situation, I would also make the wrong decision. That doesn't make it right.)
    - thret 12y ago
spodek 12y ago
> Extreme moral dilemmas are supposed to touch the very core of our moral being. So why the inconsistency? This question doesn't seem scientific. I would say, "We didn't predict this outcome, what's wrong with our theory?" If you're observing something in nature, in this case people, calling nature inconsistent doesn't make sense. Nature is consistent. Your theory has problems if it calls nature inconsistent.
- icebraining 12y ago
  I wouldn't say they're calling nature inconsistent. They're calling the supposition inconsistent. Which is more or less the same as saying the theory is inconsistent.
mcv 12y ago
Despite English not being my native language, I would object to pushing the man in front of the train. Does that mean my mastery of English is sufficient that it can touch me on the same level as my native language?
- boomlinde 12y ago
  If you read the numbers this isn't exactly exceptional. You share the opinion of the majority of the participants of the study.
ExpiredLink 12y ago
Correlation vs.causation. Here we go again ...
- mattfenwick 12y ago
  That's right. And it's not even clear that they found a correlation that would hold up in different experimental conditions. The paper is at http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0094842 http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna... , and unfortunately has the provocative title "Your Morals Depend on Language", instead of a more accurate title like "There's a possibility that some people's morals are correlated with language, but we're not sure and we're also not sure if that's true for everybody because our sampling is insufficient to allow us to draw such a conclusion".
tfinniga 12y ago
I have a theory about why that is. In the book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" there are a number of experiments described that show that human thought can roughly be separated into two systems, one of which is intuitive, fast, heuristic, and low-energy, and the other which is rational, analytical, uses more calories, and is only engaged when necessary. We use the first system most of the time, and only use the second system when we really need to. They found that when people were given something to read in a smaller font, their responses to it were more rational. This might be the same effect - if the second system is already engaged due to the difficulty of understanding the other language, the result is a more rational response. It's a very interesting book, and well done. It's a bit long, but thorough. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow
soneca 12y ago
If you want to play with the trolley problem: http://www.pippinbarr.com/games/trolleyproblem/TrolleyProblem.html http://www.pippinbarr.com/games/trolleyproblem/TrolleyProble...
- bluecalm 12y ago
  It doesn't work for me in neither Firefox nor Chrome. The space doesn't work on level 0 and 1 (training and 3 people vs 1) but it does work with fat person.
mathattack 12y ago
Gives new meaning to "Are you speaking my language?" It can have moral overtones too.
shittyanalogy 12y ago
Our Personal Predictions about Moral Judgments in Contrived Hypothetical Situations while Being Observed by a Third Party Depend on What Language We're Reading I mean seriously, if you're going to test the slight difference in people's moral attitudes based on the method of information consumption at least find it important to consistently distinguish between oral and written. That aside, this article, unless you ignore what was actually tested and just imagine it to be what you want, is saying absolutely nothing.
mattfenwick 12y ago
The paper (http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0094842 http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...) is not an example of good science. First: did they even find some kind of correlation, or is it just a statistical aberration? Second: if they found a real correlation, is their explanation of why that correlation exists correct? IMHO, their evidence does not support their claims. Where are the controls? What are the sampling biases? What are possible alternative explanations, and why are those not considered? What is the relationship between a person's response to a hypothetical situation and his/her actions in a real one? They greatly overstate their findings in the discussion section. It's almost painful to read: > We have shown that people’s moral judgments and decisions depend on the native-ness of the language in which a dilemma is presented, becoming more utilitarian in a foreign language. > Most likely, a foreign language reduces emotional reactivity, promoting cost-benefit considerations, leading to an increase in utilitarian judgments. > This discovery has important consequences for our globalized world as many individuals make moral judgments in both native and foreign languages. Immigrants face personal moral dilemmas in a foreign language on a daily basis, sometimes dilemmas with even larger stakes such as when serving as a jury member in a trial. > Given that what we have discovered is surprising and unintuitive, increasing awareness of the impact of using a foreign language may help us check our decision-making context and make choices that are based on the things that should really matter. > Foreign languages are used in international, multilingual forums such as the United Nations, the European Union, large investment firms and international corporations in general. Moral choices within these domains can be explained better, and are made more predictable by our discovery. Wait, what? When was that covered in the rest of the paper?
- JumpCrisscross 12y ago
  The premise had more potential. One set of individuals, evaluating a scenario presented to them in their native tongue, were found to react in a statistically significantly different way from a second set of individuals, evaluating the same scenario in a language foreign to them. The problem is the people in group one are not the same as those in group two. Statistical controls can mitigate the risk of randomness crashing the party. But there is an experimental solution: have the same people evaluate similar situations in a foreign and their native tongues. That said, something gained if it inspires a more rigorous study.
hartator 12y ago
Maybe when you ask native people in a foreign language, they perceive it as a game and are less serious? Maybe this "results" are nothing to do with moral judgment? I am a native french speaker and live in the U.S. "Moral" decisions feel the same for me at least. I will be more influenced by the culture around me than a choice of words...
cyphunk 12y ago
hmm psychology is fun but... I wont trust the results of this study until they ask the same set of train-switch-murderous-multilingual users to also choose between chocolate cake or fruit salad [1]. 1: http://blogs.worldbank.org/impactevaluations/fruit-salad-chocolate-cake-cognitive-control-and-poverty http://blogs.worldbank.org/impactevaluations/fruit-salad-cho...

A quote: "But it does help us predict and explain some moral choices." Predict, yes. Explain, no. Many such studies can predict that something is going to happen, that a correlation exists, but far fewer even attempt to offer a testable explanation, a way to turn a correlation into a cause-effect relationship. Science commentators as far back as Aristotle have described science as a way to craft explanations for observations, not merely describe the observations and their outcomes, which is that this study does.

wvh 12y ago

Interesting. I speak 6 languages and actively think in 3–4 of those, and I notice slight changes in my attitudes and behaviour depending on the active language in my head. It might be interesting to experiment and find out if not just the fact that it's a foreign language matters, but also the influence of the actual choice of language.

emodendroket 12y ago
That's a question that's already had a lot of attention devoted to it; look up the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis if you're interested.
Aqueous 12y ago
Wow, that's amazing. Did you learn all of those languages when you were a young child or did you learn them as you were getting older? Also, are you from a country that is bordered by a lot of other countries with native languages but doesn't have a native language of its own, like Switzerland?

simula67 12y ago

> in general people react less strongly to emotional expressions in a foreign language As a non-native English speaker, I wonder if this affects programming. Do English-speaking people find beautiful programs written in English more beautiful than others ? Anyone here programmed in both their mother tongue and one other language ?

realusername 12y ago
(French native speaker here). From the developers I know (and that is still my case to some extent) people refer to the keywords as their function rather than their meaning. So when you see a 'while' or a 'for' loop, you just interpret it as a loop regardless of the original meaning of the word, it's not English anymore, it's just code blocks. But I'm wondering how it's interpreted from the point of view of a native speaker.
- chewxy 12y ago
  I interviewed some Chinese speaking programmers in preparation for my Kiwi Pycon talk, and I found that it's the same with them. It's just meaningless symbols to them, and it might as well be triangles and circles.
- eatitraw 12y ago
  Russian native speaker here. I too never think of keywords as words in english language. As for function/variable/type/etc names and comments -- in Russia english is the standard. Russian is rarely used in comments, and using russian in code is frowned upon, so it (almost) never happens. > But I'm wondering how it's interpreted from the point of view of a native speaker. In Russia, we have company called 1C. One of the software products of this company is "1C: Enterprise". This product has some built-in language(for automatizing common accountant tasks or something like that). And keywords in this language are russian words. I've never programmed in this language. And code in it looks really horrible to me, to the point of being repulsive. Here is hello world program, in case anyone is interested: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Встроенный_язык_программирования_1С:Предприятие#.D0.9F.D1.80.D0.B8.D0.BC.D0.B5.D1.80_.D0.BF.D1.80.D0.BE.D0.B3.D1.80.D0.B0.D0.BC.D0.BC.D1.8B https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Встроенный_язык_программирован...
  - icebraining 12y ago
    We have a similar language here in Portugal (I believe it's a copy of Delphi) and I also find it extremely unpleasant to even read it.
- 12y ago

infruset 12y ago

I wonder if this might not be something else. When you study a language in a classroom, you frequently engage in conversations on various topics, whose sole purpose is to make you practice much more than to actually have a well-thought conversation. As such (and here I speak from my own experience only), it is much more common to defend positions in which you don't actually believe, for the sake of argument or maybe just because it is easier to express than the subtleties you might find while thinking this over in your native language. I think it may be a good idea to try to only ask bilingual people (as opposed to people studying a language), or at least to test the above hypothesis before jumping to conclusions.

pmr_ 12y ago
Neither of the two languages a bilingual person speaks is considered foreign. Otherwise the person would not be bilingual. What would be the result of such a study? Keep in mind that in linguistics the difference between being a native speaker and having learned a language after the critical period is considered huge.
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
  Right. Presumably for a bilingual person (where both languages are native), both languages they speak would have equal emotional impact.
- barry-cotter 12y ago
  tl:dr It's fluency that impacts utilitarianism, not nativeness. Being able to communicate in two languages is not the same as being bilingual. The study in question suggests that thinking/communicating in a language that one is less than fluent in leads to more utilitarian decisions. The important thing here is fluency, not nativeness. I am fluent in German but I started learning it at 12. German is not a native language for me but I am fluent in it. As such the study suggests I should be equally utilitarian in it and English, my mother tongue. But my French and Mandarin are both quite bad so I should be more utilitarian in them because I must be more deliberate.
- mercer 12y ago

Fice 12y ago

Pushing the large man is risky, you can't be 100% sure that it will work, and you can't be absolutely sure that five people will die if you don't do it. So it could be the willingness to take chances rather than the moral judgments.

krisgee 12y ago
In the context of the thought problem it works 100% of the time.
- Fice 12y ago
  This is not an abstract logical problem. If you imagine yourself in the situation, it still feels like taking a risk, and this will influence your answer.
- chroma 12y ago
  Even if I am confident that pushing a fat man onto some tracks will stop a trolley and save lives, it is much more likely that I have gone insane than that actually being the case. If this dilemma happened in real life, hopefully I would recognize my insanity and not push the fat man.
Ensorceled 12y ago
Normally uncooperative subjects like you are simply removed from the study :-)

GFischer 12y ago

I really liked being introduced to the Trolley Problem (especially the second formulation), I hadn't heard of it before. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem I spent more time than I should reading about several possible answers :) for example: http://philosophyfaculty.ucsd.edu/faculty/rarneson/Courses/thomsonTROLLEY.pdf http://philosophyfaculty.ucsd.edu/faculty/rarneson/Courses/t... some with a libertarian slant: http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2012/08/the-trolley-non-problem/ http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2012/08/the-trolley-non... http://freedomed.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-trolley-problem-is-bullshit.html http://freedomed.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-trolley-problem-is... Edit: where is a good place to read about and/or discuss interesting philosophical questions (preferrably not too far out :) )? Is it worth it to take a course on philosophy? (I've had short courses on "moral education" which were really awful).

innguest 12y ago
> where is a good place to read about and/or discuss interesting philosophical questions You should explore similar books to these: - The Pig That Wants to be Eaten - The Duck That Won the Lottery
- GFischer 12y ago
  Thank you :) . Will do. Edit: I've also had a recommendation of watching Michael Sandel's videos: http://www.justiceharvard.org/ http://www.justiceharvard.org/
bluecalm 12y ago
I find the focus on doing nothing versus taking action (like in the 2nd paper you linked) misguided. Utilitarian principle has place in about every serious ethical system in the history. Doing nothing to avoid responsibility doesn't. You can't really use that argument without reference to cost of action and in Trolley Problem that is conveniently close to 0. There are other factors like ensuring that people feel safe (so they don't need to worry about doctors killing them to harvest the organs) and that we value life of healthy young person higher than older and sick. Assessing how far you can go using your personal utility over one of the population is another interesting problem (mother would be justified by most for choosing to kill 2 people instead of her own child in a Trolley Problem but would be condemned by choosing to kill a whole town). In the surgeon's example there is also cost of killing (surgeon as well as patient may feel bad about it or some other values in moral system of a person might be compromised like honor or keeping an oath) but it's again only matter of weighting the arguments not action vs inaction. It's easy to realize once you up the scale a bit: make it a scenario with whole town dying instead of young healthy person and you will get a consensus. From that you can see that action vs inaction isn't really what the problem is about.

thret 12y ago

When I first heard this problem, it was told in a heart-wrenching first-person 'this actually happened' way. Roughly as follows: "A man who worked the gears for a train line took his son to work. His son ran off to play and when it came time for him to divert a train (not doing so would cause a head on collision) he couldn't see his son, but he heard him cry out - he was stuck in the gears. Diverting the train would kill his son. So he does the right thing, sacrifices his son to save hundreds of lives." This was a Sunday School story, meant to illustrate how God So Loved The World that he sacrificed his son. So I've actually always unhesitatingly believed that the needs of the many out weigh the needs of the few, or the one. As an adult and upon deeper reflection, I find that this holds true for strangers, but if I am completely honest my life and the lives of those I hold dear are worth more to me than the lives of basically any number of strangers.

GFischer 12y ago
Hmm, I think that is a different problem (too many different variables). It involves the rights and obligations of a parent, for one. I also agree I might have chosen differently if it were my son.
rayiner 12y ago
As a parent, not only would I not hit the switch, I'd blame Congress for the passenger deaths for not funding modernization of the switching infrastructure.
- philh 12y ago
  If blame is a meaningful thing to assign, I'm going to assign at least some of it to you for not watching your son, and quite a lot of it to you for not flipping the switch. I much prefer a world where you are sad and your son is dead, to a world where hundreds of people are dead, all their families are sad, and your son is alive. (That said, it's at least somewhat plausible that if I was in that situation, I would also make the wrong decision. That doesn't make it right.)
  - thret 12y ago

spodek 12y ago

> Extreme moral dilemmas are supposed to touch the very core of our moral being. So why the inconsistency? This question doesn't seem scientific. I would say, "We didn't predict this outcome, what's wrong with our theory?" If you're observing something in nature, in this case people, calling nature inconsistent doesn't make sense. Nature is consistent. Your theory has problems if it calls nature inconsistent.

icebraining 12y ago
I wouldn't say they're calling nature inconsistent. They're calling the supposition inconsistent. Which is more or less the same as saying the theory is inconsistent.

mcv 12y ago

Despite English not being my native language, I would object to pushing the man in front of the train. Does that mean my mastery of English is sufficient that it can touch me on the same level as my native language?

boomlinde 12y ago
If you read the numbers this isn't exactly exceptional. You share the opinion of the majority of the participants of the study.

ExpiredLink 12y ago

Correlation vs.causation. Here we go again ...

mattfenwick 12y ago
That's right. And it's not even clear that they found a correlation that would hold up in different experimental conditions. The paper is at http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0094842 http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna... , and unfortunately has the provocative title "Your Morals Depend on Language", instead of a more accurate title like "There's a possibility that some people's morals are correlated with language, but we're not sure and we're also not sure if that's true for everybody because our sampling is insufficient to allow us to draw such a conclusion".

tfinniga 12y ago

I have a theory about why that is. In the book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" there are a number of experiments described that show that human thought can roughly be separated into two systems, one of which is intuitive, fast, heuristic, and low-energy, and the other which is rational, analytical, uses more calories, and is only engaged when necessary. We use the first system most of the time, and only use the second system when we really need to. They found that when people were given something to read in a smaller font, their responses to it were more rational. This might be the same effect - if the second system is already engaged due to the difficulty of understanding the other language, the result is a more rational response. It's a very interesting book, and well done. It's a bit long, but thorough. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow

soneca 12y ago

If you want to play with the trolley problem: http://www.pippinbarr.com/games/trolleyproblem/TrolleyProblem.html http://www.pippinbarr.com/games/trolleyproblem/TrolleyProble...

bluecalm 12y ago
It doesn't work for me in neither Firefox nor Chrome. The space doesn't work on level 0 and 1 (training and 3 people vs 1) but it does work with fat person.

mathattack 12y ago

Gives new meaning to "Are you speaking my language?" It can have moral overtones too.

shittyanalogy 12y ago

Our Personal Predictions about Moral Judgments in Contrived Hypothetical Situations while Being Observed by a Third Party Depend on What Language We're Reading I mean seriously, if you're going to test the slight difference in people's moral attitudes based on the method of information consumption at least find it important to consistently distinguish between oral and written. That aside, this article, unless you ignore what was actually tested and just imagine it to be what you want, is saying absolutely nothing.

mattfenwick 12y ago

The paper (http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0094842 http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...) is not an example of good science. First: did they even find some kind of correlation, or is it just a statistical aberration? Second: if they found a real correlation, is their explanation of why that correlation exists correct? IMHO, their evidence does not support their claims. Where are the controls? What are the sampling biases? What are possible alternative explanations, and why are those not considered? What is the relationship between a person's response to a hypothetical situation and his/her actions in a real one? They greatly overstate their findings in the discussion section. It's almost painful to read: > We have shown that people’s moral judgments and decisions depend on the native-ness of the language in which a dilemma is presented, becoming more utilitarian in a foreign language. > Most likely, a foreign language reduces emotional reactivity, promoting cost-benefit considerations, leading to an increase in utilitarian judgments. > This discovery has important consequences for our globalized world as many individuals make moral judgments in both native and foreign languages. Immigrants face personal moral dilemmas in a foreign language on a daily basis, sometimes dilemmas with even larger stakes such as when serving as a jury member in a trial. > Given that what we have discovered is surprising and unintuitive, increasing awareness of the impact of using a foreign language may help us check our decision-making context and make choices that are based on the things that should really matter. > Foreign languages are used in international, multilingual forums such as the United Nations, the European Union, large investment firms and international corporations in general. Moral choices within these domains can be explained better, and are made more predictable by our discovery. Wait, what? When was that covered in the rest of the paper?

JumpCrisscross 12y ago
The premise had more potential. One set of individuals, evaluating a scenario presented to them in their native tongue, were found to react in a statistically significantly different way from a second set of individuals, evaluating the same scenario in a language foreign to them. The problem is the people in group one are not the same as those in group two. Statistical controls can mitigate the risk of randomness crashing the party. But there is an experimental solution: have the same people evaluate similar situations in a foreign and their native tongues. That said, something gained if it inspires a more rigorous study.

hartator 12y ago

Maybe when you ask native people in a foreign language, they perceive it as a game and are less serious? Maybe this "results" are nothing to do with moral judgment? I am a native french speaker and live in the U.S. "Moral" decisions feel the same for me at least. I will be more influenced by the culture around me than a choice of words...

cyphunk 12y ago

hmm psychology is fun but... I wont trust the results of this study until they ask the same set of train-switch-murderous-multilingual users to also choose between chocolate cake or fruit salad [1]. 1: http://blogs.worldbank.org/impactevaluations/fruit-salad-chocolate-cake-cognitive-control-and-poverty http://blogs.worldbank.org/impactevaluations/fruit-salad-cho...