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.
Publication types
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Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
MeSH terms
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Decision Making / physiology
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Emotions / physiology
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Ethical Theory
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Humans
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Judgment / physiology
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Language*
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Morals*
Grants and 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.