People have to make tough decisions every day, from doctors to politicians: Do you put 5 seriously-ill people on an expensive drug trial or 100 moderately-sick people on a less-expensive treatment? Do you increase business taxes that could bring in more cash for welfare spending, but risk putting people out of business?

When people make moral decisions, they are often torn between whether to do something that benefits individual people or benefit ‘the greater good’ at the expense of individuals. Favouring individuals is often considered to be a more emotional response, whereas thinking only of the greater good is cold and rational.

But can the language in which a tricky moral dilemma is posed affect whether someone chooses emotionally or rationally? Or could their culture play a role? A group of researchers from Spain and the US conducted two experiments involving nearly 1000 participants to find out.

So, what’s the point?

The researchers wanted to look at the differences between so-called intuitive judgement (the emotional gut-reaction that tends to favour the rights of an individual person) and rational judgement (the utilitarian approach to favour the ‘greater good’, even at the expense of individual people).

Understanding the things that affect the way we make decisions could help us to train ourselves to make better choices. It could also help us to understand how our minds create and process emotions. At the very least it would give the people who run management training courses some more material to charge for.

Experiment 1: What did they do?

The researchers conducted 2 studies. The first involved asking around 300 people, from the USA, South Korea, France and Israel, a question known as the ‘trolley dilemma’ in either their native tongue or in a foreign language that they have acquired.

The trolley dilemma goes like this: You are standing on a footbridge over a railway. A small train (trolley) is about to kill 5 people on the tracks. The only way to save them is to push a fat guy into the path of the train in order to stop it (this guy is really fat). The idea is: are you willing to sacrifice the life of one innocent person in order to save five?

The ’emotional’ response is to allow the five to die in the accident, while the ‘rational’ response is to kill one person deliberately in order to save the five.

Experiment 1: Did they prove anything?

The researchers found that around 20% of subjects chose the rational response (killing the fat guy) when asked in their mother tongue, but 30% took this option when asked in a foreign language.

Interestingly, they noticed some international differences: Koreans were far less likely to take the rational option than other nationalities, with only 7.5% choosing it when asked in a foreign language and none choosing it when asked in Korean.

The researchers figured that there might be two reasons for these findings: cultural differences and the possibility that not fully understanding the situation in a foreign language might lead to people just answering randomly. To figure out if these played a role, they conducted a second experiment.

Experiment 2: What did they do?

To test to see if not understanding the problem properly was an issue, they tried to make the question ‘less emotional’.

For this, they tweaked the question slightly: Rather than pushing a fat guy from a footbridge, the subjects had the option to pull a switch that sends the train down a different track, where one person is standing. Again, it’s a case of killing one person to save five, but the act of killing is more removed (the respondent’s action is to press a switch rather than actively shoving a person to their death).

To address cultural differences, in this experiment they focused on Spanish and English speakers, reasoning that Spanish-speaking societies tend to be more ‘collectivistic’ than English-speaking ones and should ‘prefer the common good over the rights of individuals’. They managed to recruit over 700 people for this experiment, and asked them both versions of the question.

Experiment 2: Did they prove anything?

They found similar results to experiment 1 when the first question (pushing the fat guy) was used, but that both native English- and Spanish-speakers gave many more ‘rational’ responses – 80% – in the second question (pulling the switch) regardless of the language in which the question was asked.

This led the researchers to conclude that the second question creates emotional distance from the act of killing the one person (because you pull a switch rather than directly pushing the person in front of the train).

They also reckoned that hearing the question in a foreign language also created emotional distance, resulting in more people taking the ‘rational’ choice. They also reckoned that the similarity between results of native Spanish and English speakers ruled out the possibility of cultural influences.

So, what does it mean?

Overall, the paper asks some interesting questions about how our moral decisions could be influenced by the emotional content of a question – and provided some neat evidence that using a foreign language could create emotional distance in analysing a dilemma.

However, the researchers rule out the effects of cultural differences, pointing to the findings of experiment 2. In my (relatively) humble opinion, this conclusion is flawed for two reasons:

First, it assumes that native Spanish speakers are more ‘collectivistic’ than English. In fact, their results show similar responses from both groups with both questions, and so do not support this assumption.

Second, in experiment 1, native Korean-speakers are far less likely to choose the ‘rational’ option in any language. No explanation was given for this discrepancy, but cultural differences could certainly be one.

In order to prove the absence of cultural effects, the researchers could repeat experiment 2 with native Korean-speakers and compare those results to the English and Spanish.

In conclusion, as with many scientific studies, this research seems to end up posing more new questions than it has answered (which could be a good thing if you need more grant money!), but it has shed some light on how emotional distance can be created to assist people in making rational choices.

Of course, all decisions will eventually be cold and emotionless once the machines take over. We have been warned…

Original article in PLOS One Apr 2014

All images are open-source/Creative Commons licence.

Credit: US Army (First); B Branson (Second); Maierstrahl (Third); S Bowler (Fourth)

Text © thisscienceiscrazy. If you want to use any of the writing or images featured in this article, please credit and link back to the original source as described HERE.

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