According to psychologist Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize winner for economics in 2002, in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, cognitive strain makes people more analytical. So the foreign language effect might be explained because performing tasks in a foreign language requires more taxing thought processes.

But Costa claims that, when there is no emotion involved in a particular decision, the foreign language effect seems to disappear. “It will only happen if the context in which you are making the decision triggers an emotional response in you,” he says.

Other psychologists are finding that speaking a foreign language leads to differences in the way people think and react. Ceri Ellis, a psychology researcher at the University of Manchester, says that people can be more objective in a foreign language, as they are better at deflecting false criticism about their own culture when it is expressed in a foreign language.

“The farther removed the second language is from your mother tongue, the bigger the effect,” says Ellis in an interview.

So, my own awkwardness when working in English was perhaps compensated by a more accurate way of thinking. This small perk, of course, would have vanished if I developed a tighter and more emotional relationship with the language.

So perhaps I was lucky to not fall in love during my time in the UK.

A better negotiator

But what does it mean to be more analytical? Suppose that 600,000 people have a disease and will die if they are not treated. You are presented with two options: either give them a drug that kills 400,000 of them, or a second drug that has a 33.3% chance of saving all the 600,000, but a 66.6% chance of saving no-one. What do you do?

If you chose the drug that would kill 400,000 of the patients, it was the right call – it is the safest scenario. But it is also the option that most people would choose to avoid, because it is presented in a disturbing way.

Curiously, when people are presented with the same scenario but told instead that they will save 200,000 people, most of them choose it. The mathematics is the same, but the framing of the question is different and affects how people answer.