Would you push a man off a bridge and into the path of an oncoming train to prevent the speeding locomotive from killing five people further down the track? Your answer to this moral dilemma may depend upon the language in which it is asked. Psychologists from the University of Chicago and Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona found that people who speak multiple languages tended to take a more utilitarian approach to this moral dilemma when it was presented in their non-native tongue. Researchers say their results indicate that the use of foreign languages reduces our emotional response and provides psychological distance when making moral decisions.
Research has previously found that foreign languages blunt some emotional responses. For instance, people are more rational when making certain emotionally-charged decisions when the options are presented in a foreign language. To see whether this phenomenon applied to ethical judgments, researchers recruited 725 bilingual ...
