Abstract Should you sacrifice one man to save five? Whatever your answer, it should not depend on whether you were asked the question in your native language or a foreign tongue so long as you understood the problem. And yet here we report evidence that people using a foreign language make substantially more utilitarian decisions when faced with such moral dilemmas. We argue that this stems from the reduced emotional response elicited by the foreign language, consequently reducing the impact of intuitive emotional concerns. In general, we suggest that the increased psychological distance of using a foreign language induces utilitarianism. This shows that moral judgments can be heavily affected by an orthogonal property to moral principles, and importantly, one that is relevant to hundreds of millions of individuals on a daily basis.

Citation: Costa A, Foucart A, Hayakawa S, Aparici M, Apesteguia J, Heafner J, et al. (2014) Your Morals Depend on Language. PLoS ONE 9(4): e94842. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0094842 Editor: Mariano Sigman, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina Received: December 11, 2013; Accepted: March 4, 2014; Published: April 23, 2014 Copyright: © 2014 Costa et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: This research was partially supported by grants from the Spanish Government (PSI2011-23033, CONSOLIDER-INGENIO2010 CSD2007-00048, ECO2011-25295, and ECO2010-09555-E), from the Catalan Government (SGR 2009-1521), from the 7th Framework Programme (AThEME 613465), the University of Chicago’s Wisdom Research Project and the John Templeton Foundation, a National Science Foundation grant BCS-0849034, and *Language Learning*’s Small Grants Research Program. Alice Foucart was supported by a post-doctoral fellowship from the Catalan Government (Beatriu de Pinos). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction People often believe that moral judgments about “right” and “wrong” are the result of deep, thoughtful principles and should therefore be consistent and unaffected by irrelevant aspects of a moral dilemma. For instance, as long as one understands a moral dilemma, its resolution should not depend on whether it is presented in a native language or in a foreign language. Here we report evidence that people tend to make systematically different judgments when they face a moral dilemma in a foreign language than in their native language. According to some models of moral psychology, moral judgment is driven by a complex interaction of at least two forces: intuitive “automatic” processes prompted by the emotional content of a given dilemma, and rational, effortful, controlled processes driven by the conscious evaluation of the potential outcomes [1]–[3]. In this dual process account, intuitive processes generally support judgments that favor the essential rights of a person (deontological judgments), while rational controlled processes seem to support judgments favoring the greater good (utilitarian judgments), regardless of whether or not they violate an individual’s rights [4]–[11]. The relative weight of intuitive and rational processes in moral judgments can vary, and lead to more or less deontological or utilitarian judgments. As such, establishing which conditions favor each of these two mechanisms is fundamental to understanding the psychology of morality (for a review, see [12]). The present study explores whether using a foreign language, as hundreds of millions of individuals do every day, can have a systematic impact on these processes. There are good reasons to expect that using a foreign language would reduce utilitarian resolutions of moral dilemmas. For example, there is evidence that utilitarian choice relies on controlled processes that require cognitive resources, and that an increase of cognitive load [6] or stress [13], [14] reduces utilitarian choice in moral dilemmas. The added cognitive load and anxiety of using a foreign language could therefore reduce the use of controlled processes and subsequently reduce utilitarian choice. That is, to the extent that utilitarian choice reveals a higher contribution of controlled processes and such processes require the recruitment of cognitive resources, then conditions that increase cognitive load such as the use of a foreign language should decrease utilitarian choice. Despite this potential impact of cognitive load, we propose that using a foreign language results in the opposite, that it actually increases utilitarian choice. In general, a foreign language elicits less intense emotional reactions relative to a native language [15]–[18]. For example, skin conductance responses as well as the perceived force of emotional phrases are reduced when presented in a foreign language compared to a native language [19]. Additionally, heuristic biases that are driven by emotional factors, such as loss aversion, are reduced when people make decisions in a foreign language [20], [21]. Such reduced emotionality, we argue, promotes a more reasoned, controlled process that leads to a utilitarian choice. Hence, we hypothesize that moral judgments in a foreign language would be less affected by the emotional reactivity elicited by a dilemma. This hypothesis makes a clear prediction: when faced with moral dilemmas in a foreign language, utilitarian judgments should be more common than in a native language. We tested this prediction in two experiments using the well-known trolley dilemma [22].

Experiment 1 We used the “footbridge” version of the trolley dilemma [23], where one imagines standing on a footbridge overlooking a train track. A small on-coming train is about to kill five people and the only way to stop it is to push a heavy man off the footbridge in front of the train. This will kill him, but save the five people. A utilitarian analysis dictates sacrificing one to save five; but this would violate the moral prohibition against killing, and imagining physically pushing the man is emotionally difficult and therefore people routinely avoid that [6], [24]. If we are correct, then people would be more likely to opt for sacrificing one man to save five when dealing with such moral dilemmas in a foreign language than in their native tongue. Method Participants. We collected data from several native/foreign language populations: English/Spanish (N = 112) in the US, Korean/English (N = 80) in Korea, English/French (N = 107) in France, and Spanish or English/Hebrew (N = 18) in Israel. The native language varied in Israel because we recruited participants in a school for learning Hebrew. Participants were late learners of the foreign language who did not grow up speaking it at home. Sufficient proficiency to understand the instructions was assessed through comprehension checks. Proficiency and background information are included in Table 1. Participation was voluntary and the experimental protocol was approved by the IRB of the Social Sciences Division of the University of Chicago. Seventy-two additional participants were excluded because they either failed to comprehend the scenario (N = 41), grew up with the language (N = 16), did not clearly indicate an answer (N = 3), or were not native speakers of the native language (N = 12). PPT PowerPoint slide

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larger image TIFF original image Download: Table 1. Experiment 1′s participants’ details. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0094842.t001 Procedure and materials. All materials were translated from English and back-translated for comparability [25]. The consent form, materials and conversation with the experimenter were in the assigned language. Participants read a packet with the scenario and a cartoon depiction of the scene. After they indicated their decision, they answered questions regarding demographic and language background, and the foreign language packet contained a comprehension check. Crucially, within each language-pair group, participants were randomly assigned to either their native tongue (N = 158) or a foreign language (N = 159). Results and Discussion Across all populations more participants selected the utilitarian choice, to save five by killing one, when using the foreign language than their native tongue (Table 2). The difference between the foreign and the native language condition ranged from 7.5 percentage points to 65 percentage points. Taking a weighted average across populations, we find that the rate of utilitarian decisions in a foreign language was increased by more than half compared to the native tongue (from 20% to 33%; χ2(1, N = 317) = 6.9, p<.01, φ = .148). PPT PowerPoint slide

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larger image TIFF original image Download: Table 2. Percentage of Utilitarian Decisions by Language Condition in Experiment 1. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0094842.t002 While for all four language groups in this experiment the pattern was in the predicted direction, we note two things that are worth considering. First, none of the Korean participants in the native language condition chose to push the man, which might seem unusual. This could reflect a cultural prohibition, and is consistent with the finding that East Asians are less likely to select the utilitarian choice with such dilemmas [26]. Despite this, the Korean group showed a 7.5 pp difference between the native and foreign language. The second thing to note is the unusually high difference for the group who used Hebrew as a foreign language. While the other three groups showed a modest difference between the native and foreign conditions of 7.5, 13, and 16 percentage points, that group showed a large 65 pp difference. Most likely this is an artifact of the small size of that group (N = 18) and should not be interpreted as reflecting any special quality of that group. To make sure our results are not determined by this group we re-analyzed the data without it and found the same pattern. Of people using their native language, 21% made the utilitarian decision as compared to 31% using a foreign language, χ2(1, N = 299) = 4.0, p<.05. The results support the hypothesis that the reduced emotional resonance of a foreign language leads individuals to be less affected by an emotional aversion to pushing the man, allowing them to make more utilitarian decisions. Experiment 2 replicated the effect and evaluated two alternative explanations.

General Discussion 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. These results are important for models of moral decision making because they show that identical dilemmas may elicit different moral judgements depending on a seemingly irrelevant aspect such as the native-ness of the language. Most likely, a foreign language reduces emotional reactivity, promoting cost-benefit considerations, leading to an increase in utilitarian judgments. The reduction of the emotionality elicited by a foreign language may promote psychological distance in general. Increasing psychological distance leads individuals to construe situations in more abstract terms, which in some circumstances aligns with more utilitarian decision making [30], [31]. For instance, a more abstract mind-set is associated with a greater focus on ends than means, leading to more utilitarian decisions in moral dilemmas like the footbridge problem [32]. Another factor that may contribute to the effect of a foreign language on moral judgement is cognitive fluency. Studies have shown that disrupting cognitive fluency or slowing down decisions decreases decision biases by moving individuals to a more careful and deliberative mode of processing [33], [34]. Given that using a foreign language could reduce cognitive fluency [35], [36], it might diminish the impact of intuitive processes on moral judgment. That said, our results suggest that the emotional reaction has an impact above and beyond it. According to the logic of the CRT, the worse the performance is on the task, the more people are using intuitive rather than controlled processes. For individuals who performed the worst on the CRT task and solved none of the three problems, using a foreign language increased utilitarian choices by 27 percentage points. This increase was virtually identical to the overall impact of a foreign language (26 percentage points). This suggests that the effect persists for moral judgments even when the foreign language is not disfluent enough to disrupt intuitive problem solving as indicated by the CRT. Note, however, that we did find an effect of language proficiency on the percentage of utilitarian choices in Experiment 2. That is, the more proficient the participants considered themselves in the foreign language the more their decision patterns resembled that of the native speakers. In our view, this result suggests that increasing foreign language proficiency may promote emotional grounding, hence eliciting similar emotional reactions to that of a native language. Future studies could evaluate this interpretation as it makes a clear prediction that highly proficient foreign language speakers should show a markedly reduced foreign language effect on moral judgments. All the accounts above have in common the notion that moral dilemmas faced in a foreign language may promote deliberative processes and reduce emotionally-driven responses. Hence, they fit very well with models of moral decision making that consider moral judgments as the result of the interplay of intuitive emotionally driven processes and rational thoughtful processes [1]–[3]. The results are also consistent with the notion that in some cases decision making in a foreign language could be less affected by intuitive heuristics. 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. 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. Indeed, awareness of the impact of the native-ness of the language on moral dilemmas is fundamental to making more informed choices. Whether you believe that adherence to moral rules is a better choice or that a utilitarian cost-benefit analysis is the better one [12], [37], regardless of your morals, your decisions should not be a function of the native-ness of the language you are using. It shouldn’t matter if you are considering the life of “the large man” or of “el hombre grande.” But it does matter. 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.

Acknowledgments We would like to thank the Council on International Educational Exchange as well as the teachers from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, the Universitat de Barcelona, the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the Universidad de Málaga for helping us collect the data by giving us access to their students. We would also like to thank our colleagues for their useful comments.

Author Contributions Conceived and designed the experiments: AC AF SH JA BK. Performed the experiments: AF SH MA JH. Analyzed the data: AC AF SH MA JA JH BK. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: AC AF SH MA JA JH BK. Wrote the paper: AC AF SH JA BK.