There is solid evidence (see this and this), that bilinguals exhibit different personality traits in different languages. However, it is much more accurate to note that it’s not language that makes people different, but the culture associated with the language. We would not argue, for example, that if someone is more jocular in a clown suit than in a tuxedo, the reason is the clothing. Rather, we would say that those clothes are associated with certain emotions and attitudes. Theoretically, one could be quite the party animal in a cummerbund, and quite the downer while wearing face paint, a red nose, and large shoes.

The philosophy linking individual attributes to language itself took root as a way of validating the intelligence of people once deemed “savages.” When dedicated amateur linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf popularized this theory in the 1930s—preaching that the Hopi’s language had no markers of tense and that this demonstrated their cyclical conception of time (this turned out not to be true)—Webster’s Second New International Dictionary still had an entry for Apaches that described their “warlike disposition and relatively low culture.”

Despite these good intentions, the mode of thinking Whorf kicked off is flawed. There will always be a temptation to suppose a link between how a language works and the thought patterns of its speakers. One reason for the temptation is obvious: Languages have words and expressions for the things that are important to their speakers. English has words for computer parts. People living on mountainsides are often more likely to say uphill and downhill instead of in front of or behind. The Inuit don’t have hundreds of words for snow, but some have argued that they have more than we do. And no one would consider that a surprise.

But we do not say that English makes us think more about computer parts, or that the Inuit subdivide kinds of snow because it’s in their language. Yet it is this kind of analysis that people who favor the language-as-thought idea espouse. In Russian there’s no one word for blue. You have to specify whether you mean dark or light. And so we are told this means Russians process the difference between the color of a robin’s egg and the color of a blueberry more vividly than English speakers. Or, in many languages, grammar specifies what something is made of: In Chinese and Japanese, for instance, you have to say “a skinny of pencil,” “a round of apple,” and so on. And tests do show that if you strap someone into a clever psychological experiment, they have tiny flickers of sensitivity beyond those of an English speaker.

The problem is this worldview business. None of the evidence suggests, as we are so often told, that speakers of these languages are walking around on different acid trips than the rest of us. Here are three quick reasons why.