PLoS One. 2014 Apr 23;9(4):e94842. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0094842. eCollection 2014.

Your morals depend on language.

Costa A1, Foucart A2, Hayakawa S3, Aparici M4, Apesteguia J5, Heafner J6, Keysar B3.

Author information

• 1Center of Brain and Cognition, CBC, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain; Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA), Barcelona, Spain.
• 2Center of Brain and Cognition, CBC, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain.
• 3Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, United States of America.
• 4Departament de Psicologia Bàsica, Evolutiva i de l'Educació, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain.
• 5Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA), Barcelona, Spain; Department of Economics, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain.
• 6Department of Human Development and Family Studies, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut, United States of America.

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.