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Rationality and second languages | ||
Tags: Scientific Research | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| AlexTG Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 4432 days ago 178 posts - 354 votes  Speaks: English*, French Studies: Latin, German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 1 of 11 17 May 2014 at 6:54am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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"You are on a footbridge watching a trolley speeding down a track that will kill five unsuspecting people. You
can push a fat man over the bridge onto the tracks to save the five. (You cannot stop the trolley by jumping yourself, only the fat man is heavy enough.) Would you do it?" A psychological study has found that people are more likely to push the fat man if the question is presented in a non-native language! "Dr Costa and his colleagues interviewed 317 people, all of whom spoke two languages—mostly English plus one of Spanish, Korean or French. Half of each group were randomly assigned the dilemma in their native tongue. The other half answered the problem in their second language. When asked in their native language, only 20% of subjects said they would push the fat man. When asked in the foreign language, the proportion jumped to 33%" Gained In Translation 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5030 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 2 of 11 17 May 2014 at 10:15am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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So you're saying people who speak two languages don't like obese people?
;-) 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Retinend Triglot Senior Member SpainRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4102 days ago 283 posts - 557 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Arabic (Written), French | Message 3 of 11 17 May 2014 at 1:09pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I'm deeply skeptical. For one thing the article is poorly written.
And that kind of thinking helps to provide psychological and emotional distance, in much the same way that replacing the fat man with a switch does. As further support for that idea, the researchers note that the effect of speaking the foreign language became smaller as the speaker’s familiarity with it increased. "the effect of speaking the foreign language became smaller"? If this sentence is supposed to mean that the observed effect of increased acceptance of the one-life-for-five trade, when posed in a foreign language, decreased in correlation with increased fluency, then how does it support the general principle that speaking in a second language enhances our rationalizing systems of thought? To me this can only suggest that the original results were the result of miscommunication of the thought experiment between experimenter and participant. Edited by Retinend on 17 May 2014 at 1:11pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| nicozerpa Triglot Senior Member Argentina Joined 4120 days ago 182 posts - 315 votes Speaks: Spanish*, Portuguese, English Studies: Italian, German | Message 4 of 11 17 May 2014 at 2:22pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Link to the complete research study: PLOS ONE: Your Morals Depend on
Language 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5326 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 11 17 May 2014 at 2:24pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
When trying to understand a scientific result, it's almost always best to ignore the press reports, which are typically oversimplified or outright wrong. Although in this case, the Economist did a pretty good job. The actual paper is here: Your Morals Depend on Language (EDIT: nicozerpa beat me to it). It's based on the trolley problem, a well-known thought experiment in human morality. The trolley problem involves trading one life for five—but people respond to this dilemma in really complicated ways. A tiny change in the scenario will produce large changes in people's moral intuitions. This can be observed and measured in the lab. The PLOS paper provides some more background:
To make this a bit more concrete, you could set up the trolley problem in two different ways: 1. As a trolley driver, you're moving at high speed, and forced to choose between track A and track B. There's one person standing on track A, and five people standing on track B. Most people will choose track A: It's better to kill one person than five, if you're forced to make a decision. 2. Now, imagine that you're a bystander, and you see that the trolley will run over 5 people unless stopped. But the only way to stop the trolley is to push a large object in front of it, making the driver panic and slam on the brakes. And the only large object is another bystander. (OK, this variant is dumb, but it has been used for a while.) In this case, most people will say it's immoral to kill one person to save five. The problem is that people typically give completely different answers for (1) and (2). There are two different moral principles at stake: Should you sacrifice one life to save five? And can you kill an innocent person in cold blood to further a plan, even if that plan will save five people? People will choose to follow one principle or the other, but their responses are exquisitely sensitive to fine details of how you pose the question. See the Wikipedia article for lots of examples. Now, how does language play into this? Well, for a truly near-native speaker, L1 versus L2 makes little difference, pretty much by definition. If you speak a language day in and day out for 20 years, it's not that different from speaking it from birth, despite an accent or an occasionally odd preposition. But let's imagine somebody halfway between B1 and B2. They can read and understand, but it's an effort: they guess a lot, they cheat using cognates, and they rely heavily on hard mental effort to make sense of things. The argument in this PLOS paper is that if you're working really hard to understand things, it will affect how you weigh competing moral principles. Because your the "logical" systems of your brain are so deeply engaged, and the "emotional" subsystems of brain aren't fully involved, you'll tend to favor certain moral principles over others. But once you get good enough at a language to understand it effortlessly, this effect apparently diminishes. Under normal circumstances, I understand my wife's French as easily and effortlessly as if it were English. And French carries quite a bit of emotional content for me: I know that, coming from a professional adult my age, connard "f**king idiot" is a nasty insult. Why? Because I've spent a lot of time around French acquaintances, and I've noticed that half of them never use it, and the other half only use it when they're enraged by somebody's stupidity. And so, given enough exposure, your L2 will almost as effortless and emotionally significant as your L1. So it makes sense that this effect gets smaller as students get better. Personally, I think this is interesting paper. Not really surprising, of course, and I haven't read the methodology sections closely. But at least it makes intuitive sense. (Which is dangerous in and of itself, because clever papers that make intuitive sense will be subjected to less scrutiny than papers that seem intuitively wrong.) Edited by emk on 17 May 2014 at 2:28pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Retinend Triglot Senior Member SpainRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4102 days ago 283 posts - 557 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Arabic (Written), French | Message 6 of 11 17 May 2014 at 3:29pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I'm aware of the thought experiment, emk.
I will read the original paper, but I don't think it's interesting or supportive to the argument that more fluent speakers of foreign languages will diminish the observed effect when put through the same tests as intermediates. If the conclusions could say something significant about "speaking in a foreign language", as modally distinct from speaking your native tongue, then the effects would be strengthened by increasing ability of speaking in that foreign language. If the paper has a strong methodology and can exclude the possibility that the students taking part aren't simply misunderstanding some important part of the though experiment (as you said, it's fame rests on its sensitivity to small details), as I suggested, it would still be a conclusion that cannot serve the hypothesis that we want: that there is a significant difference between thought when through a second language and when thought through one's native language. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5326 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 7 of 11 17 May 2014 at 4:38pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
The controls in the paper are pretty good: They test for understanding, and exclude people who are struggling. They try to account for an increased tendency to guess randomly in the L2. And they test students for their ability to reason logically in their L2:
As studies go, it's at least superficially creditable. They control for the obvious things. Now, this doesn't mean the results are accurate—a lot of plausible-looking research is false—but this isn't a case of blatantly sub-standard research being blown out of all proportion by the press, either.
Well, if you read the paper, they're not arguing for an essential difference between people's L1s and L2s. Instead, this paper is about the emotional "buffering" effect of using a relatively weak language to communicate. Based on their model, they explicitly predict that very strong L2 speakers should be much more like L1 speakers:
To use a personal example, I still find Egyptian to be very sterile. With luck and a dictionary, I may be able to decipher the literal meaning of the words on the page. But French is far more emotionally rich: I can be moved almost to tears by poetry, I can laugh with delight the beauty of an author's style, and I can be wounded by an insult. French is real to me—not all the time, but sometimes almost as real and immediate as English. So Egyptian will provide a strong emotional buffer, French will provide a much smaller one, and English will provide none at all. But then, I'm very much of the school of thought that anybody who attends university in their L2 and then uses it day-in and day-out for another 5 or 10 years is a very close approximation of a native speaker. They'll probably still have a light accent, and they'll make a few more grammatical errors, but they still have vastly more in common with a native speaker than they do with somebody at B1. So to me, it makes perfect sense that as L2 speakers get better, they start to resemble natives more and more. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Retinend Triglot Senior Member SpainRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4102 days ago 283 posts - 557 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Arabic (Written), French | Message 8 of 11 17 May 2014 at 6:29pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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After having read it, my problems hinge on the way it uses the phrase "to use a foreign language." I apologize for the repetitiveness
of this post on account of this cumbersome phrase. Certainly this evidence accords with the truism that the concentration is higher when you're reading a foreign text that we are not fully comfortable reading. It's also natural to have more pride in performance when you're being tested in a foreign language: perhaps this is why the "Cognitive Reflection Test" yielded better results when it was given in an L2. To the extent that this paper is providing evidence that we do indeed concentrate harder and feel detached from the material we read, I wouldn't want to quibble. But after having read the article, there is still exactly the problem I considered when I read the Economist article summary: that of its strange definition of "using a foreign language," which seems negated by the results of tests those truly proficient in using one.
All the way through the article simply intimates that the participants are "using a foreign language" with no qualification to make clear that their results apply only to those at some level below proficiency. The context adds no tone of qualification - the qualification comes right at the end, and is surely a let down to anyone taken in by these earlier statements: Here we report evidence that people tend to make systematically different judgments when they face a moral dilemma in a foreign language than in their native language. The present study explores whether using a foreign language, as hundreds of millions of individuals do every day, can have a systematic impact on these processes. Despite this potential impact of cognitive load, we propose that using a foreign language results in the opposite, that it actually increases utilitarian choice. Reading these statements leaves no room for your qualification of "relatively weak" users of a foreign language. Later on in the article indeed comes the twist that... the more proficient the participants considered themselves in the foreign language the more their decision patterns resembled that of the native speakers. So the observed effect diminishes along with the increased proficiency of the foreigner language user... which would seem to make them less of a "foreign language user" according to the earlier usage of the phrase "to use a foreign language" quoted above. A fluent, proficient user of a foreigner language should actually more of a "foreign language user" - at least a better representative of the activity of speaking a foreign language! When the paper turns to the consequences of these results, this problem of proficient-foreign-language-use-negating-their-results makes it hard to accept as a serious concern that: Immigrants face personal moral dilemmas in a foreign language on a daily basis, sometimes dilemmas with even larger stakes such as when serving as a jury member in a trial. ...since the effects of temporary utilitarianism will vanish once the immigrant has lived in the country for a few years and has become more automatic in/ emotionally connected to the language. The other proposed consequences of their results seem to me equally as worthy of skepticism. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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