In a study recently published in the journal PloS One, our two research teams, working independently, discovered that when people are presented with the trolley problem in a foreign language, they are more willing to sacrifice one person to save five than when they are presented with the dilemma in their native tongue.
One research team, working in Barcelona, recruited native Spanish speakers studying English (and vice versa) and randomly assigned them to read this dilemma in either English or Spanish. In their native tongue, only 18 percent said they would push the man, but in a foreign language, almost half (44 percent) would do so. The other research team, working in Chicago, found similar results with languages as diverse as Korean, Hebrew, Japanese, English and Spanish. For more than 1,000 participants, moral choice was influenced by whether the language was native or foreign. In practice, our moral code might be much more pliable than we think.
Extreme moral dilemmas are supposed to touch the very core of our moral being. So why the inconsistency? The answer, we believe, is reminiscent of Nelson Mandela’s advice about negotiation: “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.” As psychology researchers such as Catherine Caldwell-Harris have shown, in general people react less strongly to emotional expressions in a foreign language.
-- Boaz Keysar and Albert Costa, Our Moral Tongue, New York Times, June 20, 2014
This quote implies a connection from “people react less strongly to emotional expressions in a foreign language” to “dilemmas in a foreign language don’t touch the very core of our moral being”. Furthermore, it connects or equates being more willing to sacrifice one person for five and “touch[ing] the core of our moral being” less. All rational people should object to the first implication, and most should object to the second one. This is a profoundly anti-rational quote, not a rationality quote.
I think you’re reading a lot into that one sentence. I assumed that just to mean “there should not be inconsistencies due to irrelevant aspects like the language of delivery”. Followed by a sound explanation for the unexpected inconsistency in terms of system 1 / system 2 thinking.
(The final paragraph of the article begins with “Our research does not show which choice is the right one.”)
What do we suppose is meant by ‘the very core of our moral being’? If people react differently depending on language, isn’t that evidence that there is a connection? Or at least that the moral core is doing something different?
Someone who characterized the results the way they characterize them in this quote has learned some facts, but failed on the analysis.
It’s like a quote which says “(correct mathematical result) proves that God has a direct hand in the creation of the world”. That wouldn’t be a rationality quote just because they really did learn a correct mathematical result.
There are a lot of senses of ‘quote’ which I agree this does not fit well, but in the ‘excerpt from an interesting article’ sense I think it is, well, interesting.
I agree with Jiro, this appears to be an anti-rationality quote. The most straightforward interpretation of the data is that people didn’t understand the question as well when posed in a foreign language.
Chalk this one up not to emotion, but to deontology.
Possible that they understood the question, but hearing it in a foreign language meant cognitive strain, which meant they were already working in System 2. That’s my read anyway.
Given to totally fluent second-language speakers, I bet the effect vanishes.
-- Boaz Keysar and Albert Costa, Our Moral Tongue, New York Times, June 20, 2014
This quote implies a connection from “people react less strongly to emotional expressions in a foreign language” to “dilemmas in a foreign language don’t touch the very core of our moral being”. Furthermore, it connects or equates being more willing to sacrifice one person for five and “touch[ing] the core of our moral being” less. All rational people should object to the first implication, and most should object to the second one. This is a profoundly anti-rational quote, not a rationality quote.
I think you’re reading a lot into that one sentence. I assumed that just to mean “there should not be inconsistencies due to irrelevant aspects like the language of delivery”. Followed by a sound explanation for the unexpected inconsistency in terms of system 1 / system 2 thinking.
(The final paragraph of the article begins with “Our research does not show which choice is the right one.”)
What do we suppose is meant by ‘the very core of our moral being’? If people react differently depending on language, isn’t that evidence that there is a connection? Or at least that the moral core is doing something different?
I disagree with Jiro and Salemicus. Learning about how human brains work is entirely relevant to rationality.
Someone who characterized the results the way they characterize them in this quote has learned some facts, but failed on the analysis.
It’s like a quote which says “(correct mathematical result) proves that God has a direct hand in the creation of the world”. That wouldn’t be a rationality quote just because they really did learn a correct mathematical result.
There are a lot of senses of ‘quote’ which I agree this does not fit well, but in the ‘excerpt from an interesting article’ sense I think it is, well, interesting.
I agree with Jiro, this appears to be an anti-rationality quote. The most straightforward interpretation of the data is that people didn’t understand the question as well when posed in a foreign language.
Chalk this one up not to emotion, but to deontology.
Possible that they understood the question, but hearing it in a foreign language meant cognitive strain, which meant they were already working in System 2. That’s my read anyway.
Given to totally fluent second-language speakers, I bet the effect vanishes.
It’s also possible that asking a different language causes subjects to think of the people in the dilemma as “not members of their tribe”.