Would you sacrifice one person to save many? Imagine you are standing on a footbridge over rail tracks. An approaching trolley is about to kill five people farther down the tracks. The only way to stop the trolley is to push a very large man off the footbridge and onto the tracks below. This will save the five people but kill the man. (It will not help if you jump; you are not large enough). Do you push him? Although no one approves of killing an innocent person, sacrificing one person to save five has its own compelling moral logic. But according to a variety of studies only 10-20% of people chose to push the man.

Boaz Keysar’s Multilingualism and Decision Making (MuDM) Lab recently made a surprising discovery in collaboration with a research team in Barcelona headed by Albert Costa. When the same people consider this moral dilemma in a foreign language, more than twice as many decide to sacrifice the one person to save the five. About 40-50% choose this utilitarian option, preferring to act in the benefit of the greater good rather than the moral rule against killing. This was replicated with more than 2000 people with languages as diverse as English, Korean, Spanish, Japanese, Hebrew, Italian and German.

The moral choices we make in our native tongues are suffused with emotions that can prevent us from taking the utilitarian option. Using a foreign language provides a psychological and emotional distance, which allows individuals to make different, and often more reasoned decisions across a variety of domains. In finance, the lab team has discovered that people using a foreign language are less averse to taking monetary risks relative to those using their native tongue, allowing them to make bolder decisions that could benefit them in the long run. In medicine, people using a foreign tongue have more consistent choices regarding treatment and are less swayed by the way choices are framed relative to native language users. The lab team is also examining situations in which decision making benefits from an emotional gut reaction, where one could use a foreign language to reduce the optimality of choice.

To study the implications of using a foreign language for individuals and society, the lab team has initiated a large-scale, multi-disciplinary project in collaboration with economist Ali Hortacsu, sociologist James Evans, political scientist Eric Oliver as well as psychologists Howard Nusbaum, Greg Norman and Albert Costa. The project will explore the implications of foreign language use for pertinent issues such as creativity in science and patents, economic distortions in auctions, and magical thinking in politics. The National Science Foundation recently funded this multidisciplinary project with a 5-year grant, and the team is very excited about the opportunity to better understand the role of language in cognition, through which it hopes to provide policy makers with useful tools to better understand decision making. Most importantly, the research findings promise to be relevant for millions of people who use a foreign language on a daily basis such as immigrants, international business people, and diplomats.