Your morals depend on language

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.