1. As Vladimir Nabokov revised his autobiography, Speak, Memory, he found himself in a strange psychological state. He had first written the book in English, published in 1951. A few years later, a New York publisher asked him to translate it back into Russian for the émigré community. The use of his mother tongue brought back a flood of new details from his childhood, which he converted into his adopted language for a final edition, published in 1966.
2. “This re-Englishing of a Russian re-version of what had been an English re-telling of Russian memories in the first place, proved to be a diabolical task,” he wrote. “But some consolation was given me by the thought that such multiple metamorphosis, familiar to butterflies, had not been tried by any human before.”
3. Over the past decade, psychologists have become increasingly interested in using such mental metamorphoses. Besides altering the quality of our memories, switching between languages can influence people’s financial decision-making and their appraisal of moral dilemmas. By speaking a second language, we can even become more rational, more open-minded and better equipped to deal with uncertainty. This phenomenon is known as the “foreign language effect” and the benefits may be an inspiration for anyone who would like to enrich their mind with the words of another tongue.
English is your second language. Are there any ways it has changed your way of thinking?
4. The foreign language effect should not be confused with the older concept of “linguistic determinism”, which proposes that the specific words and grammar of a language can change the way we perceive the world. In this view, people’s colour perception should change according to the terms that we use to divide the rainbow, while people’s perception of time may be influenced by the grammatical tenses they use.
5. You may be familiar with this idea from the film Arrival, in which the aliens’ language mysteriously shapes their experience of the world. Whether this happens in real life, however, is still a matter of considerable scientific debate.
6. The foreign language effect does not depend on the particular features of the language that someone speaks; instead, it is concerned with the general experience of moving from a first to a second language. How will my thinking change, for example, when I move from English, which I absorbed in my cot, to Italian, which I have painstakingly studied as an adult?
Do you know any people who grew up speaking more than one language? For example returnees or bicultural people. How did their thinking differ from yours?
Influencing moral reasoning: the ‘trolley problem’
7. For Prof Boaz Keysar at the University of Chicago, who pioneered this research, the inspiration was personal. He grew up in Israel, and has now lived in the US for more than three decades, but still finds that Hebrew has more emotional resonance than English. Driving home from work one day, he started to wonder whether this might influence our moral reasoning, which is often driven by our gut feelings rather than logical reasoning.
8. Imagine, for instance, that you are standing on a footbridge when you see that an oncoming train is about to kill five people walking on the track. The only way to save these five people is to push a heavy man off the bridge in front of the train. He will die but the impact will prevent the train from hitting the other five people.
9. This is considered the “utilitarian” choice in a version of the thought experiment known as the “trolley problem”. Many people feel such strong revulsion at the idea of pushing the man to his death that they would prefer to take no action at all, even though that means that many more lives will be lost.
10. In a preliminary experiment, Keysar’s team asked participants who had learned Spanish as a second language to consider this dilemma in either their native or adopted tongue. As he had hypothesised, they were far more likely to make the utilitarian choice when they used Spanish compared with English. The effect was so big that Keysar delayed publishing the results. “I just didn’t believe the data,” he says. A later collaboration with Albert Costa at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, however, documented the same results across diverse participants from the US, Europe and Asia. In one sample, participants were twice as likely to choose the utilitarian option when speaking a second language.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/sep/17/how-learning-thinking-in-a-foreign-language-improves-decision-making
