‘We think rationally in foreign language’
New research has revealed that thinking in a foreign language helps people make more rational decisions.
In fact, researchers at the University of Chicago have found that people are more likely to take favourable risks if they think in a foreign language.
“We know from previous research that because people are naturally loss-averse, they often forgo attractive opportunities. Our new findings demonstrate that such aversion to losses is much reduced when people make decisions in their non-native language.
“A foreign language provides a distancing mechanism that moves people from the immediate intuitive system to a more deliberate mode of thinking,” lead researcher Boaz Keysar said in a release.
In one of the most telling experiments, they tested native English speakers at the University of Chicago who gained Spanish proficiency in the classroom, in order to see how loss aversion influenced their decision-making.
The experiment explored how likely the students were to take attractive bets depending on the language in which they considered their options. Each participant received $15 in dollar bills, from which they took $1 for each bet.
The subjects could either keep the dollar or risk it for the possibility of getting an extra $1.50 if they won a coin toss. So in each round, they could net $2.50 if they won the toss, or get nothing if they lost. The bets were attractive because statistically, the students stood to come out ahead if they took all 15 bets.
When given the experiment in English, the students thought myopically. The students who considered the problem in English focused on their fear of losing each bet, and took the bet only 54 per cent of the time.
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