Your morals depend on language

Costa, Albert, 1970-; Foucart, Alice; Hayakawa, Sayuri; Aparici Aznar, Melina; Apesteguía, José; Heafner, Joy; Keysar, Boaz

doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0094842

Your morals depend on language

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Citation

Costa A, Foucart A, Hayakawa S, Aparici M, Apesteguia J, Heafner J, Keysar B. Your morals depend on language. PLoS ONE. 2014;9(4):1-7. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0094842.

Abstract

Should you sacrifice one man to save five? Whatever your answer, it should not depend on whether you were asked the/nquestion in your native language or a foreign tongue so long as you understood the problem. And yet here we report/nevidence that people using a foreign language make substantially more utilitarian decisions when faced with such moral/ndilemmas. We argue that this stems from the reduced emotional response elicited by the foreign language, consequently/nreducing the impact of intuitive emotional concerns. In general, we suggest that the increased psychological distance of/nusing a foreign language induces utilitarianism. This shows that moral judgments can be heavily affected by an orthogonal/nproperty to moral principles, and importantly, one that is relevant to hundreds of millions of individuals on a daily basis.