While we tend to think words are just sounds we make to express ideas, science is finding that language is more like a fun house mirror, warping what we see in mind-blowing ways. For instance ...

On some level we already know that language shapes the way we think. We're automatically more afraid to fight a guy named Jack Savage than somebody named Peewee Nipplepuss, even if we've never seen either of them before. It's totally illogical, but you probably run into an example of that every day, and don't notice it.

5 Speaking English Makes Us More Likely to Blame People

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Let's say your roommate Steve is jumping on your bed. Maybe you have a Tempur-Pedic mattress and he wants to see if he can make a glass of wine fall over, like in the commercials. The frame breaks and the bed collapses. Your other roommate yells from the hall, "What the hell happened?"

How will you answer? Will you say, "That dipshit Steve broke the bed?" That's true, but he wasn't trying to break it. Or would you just say, "The bed was broken?"



Keep in mind, Steve pulls this shit all the time.

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The answer largely depends on what language you speak. And the language won't just determine how you phrase it, but who you actually blame for the accident. An English speaker is more likely to name Steve as the responsible party -- even if he wasn't jumping on the bed like a jackass but just sat on it. A speaker in Japan or Spain would be more likely to just say, "It broke."

Stanford scientists did experiments on this, by having speakers of various languages watch videos featuring, in various situations, people breaking eggs or popping balloons, sometimes on purpose, sometimes on accident. The subjects didn't know why they were watching.



"Maybe it's a kid-friendly version of Jackass?"

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Later, the scientists quizzed the subjects on the people in the videos. In videos where the guy intentionally broke the egg, all of the subjects, regardless of language, were equally good at remembering details of the guy. After all, he's the one who broke the egg. The video was about him, the egg breaker.