How does morality change with language change

What defines our personality? Our habits? Our aesthetic tastes? Our memory? If I had to answer, I would say that if I have some kind of personality basis, an integral part of myself, then this is my moral center, my built-in sense of what is good and what is bad.

And yet, like other people who know more than one language, I sometimes feel that with each of my languages ​​I become a little different person. More pushy with English, more relaxed with French, more sentimental with Czech. Is it possible that along with these changes my moral compass also points in different directions, depending on the language currently used?
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Psychologists who study moral judgments have already become interested in this issue. Several studies examine how people evaluate ethics in a non-native language — for example, as a group of UN delegates use the lingua franca language to discuss resolutions. The discoveries suggest that in the case of moral dilemmas, people may behave differently, depending on whether they think in their native language or in another.

In a study from 2014 under the leadership of Albert Costa, volunteers were put in front of the “dilemma of the trolley”. Heavy unmanaged trolley rushes along the rails. On its way there are five people tied to the rails by a crazy philosopher. Fortunately, you can switch the arrow - and then the trolley will go on a different, siding. Unfortunately, on the siding is one person, also tied to the rails. Do you switch the arrow?

Most people agree to switch the switch. And what if the only way to stop the cart would be to shove a stranger on the rails in front of her? Here people are already beginning to hesitate, although in both cases one life saves five. But Costa and colleagues found that if volunteers regard this dilemma in a language that is not native to them, their willingness to push a stranger under a trolley increases dramatically: from less than 20% of those who want to do it, who worked in their native language, to more than 50% who want to work on foreign.

The experiment involved Spanish-speaking and English-speaking volunteers. The results were the same for both groups, which proves that the experiment was played by changing the language to someone else, and not what language the subjects passed on.

In a completely different experiment, Janet Geipel and his colleagues also found that using a foreign language changed the moral decisions of their subjects. They have volunteers read a description of incidents in which no one was injured, but still worthy of blame. For example, in one story, relatives were engaged in safe sex by mutual consent, and in another, the dog’s owner cooked and ate it after it was hit by a car. Those who read stories in a foreign language (English or Italian) condemned them less than those who read them in their native language.

Why do moral evaluations differ depending on the use of a native or foreign language? One explanation says that two separate and competing modes of thinking are involved in the assessment process. One is a quick sensation, “intuition”, and the other is a thorough weighing of good and bad. When using a foreign language, we unconsciously move on to the second option, since the efforts to process a foreign language switch us to the mode of in-depth thinking. This may seem paradoxical, but corresponds to other discoveries — for example , reading math problems written in hard-to-read type of text leads to a decrease in the number of stupid mistakes (although the results of this study have proved difficult to reproduce ).

Another explanation is that the differences are due to greater emotional attachment to the language learned in childhood than to what we learned in a more academic setting. As a result, moral judgments in a foreign language are not so connected with the emotional reactions that occur when using the language that we learned in childhood.

There is evidence that memory interweaves a language with experience and interactions obtained during its study. For example, people who speak two languages will remember the experience more easily if you ask about it in the language associated with this event. Our children's languages, studied in the throes of our passionate emotions - after all, whose childhood did not pass with an abundance of love, rage, surprise and punishment? - permeated with deep feelings. Conversely, languages ​​acquired at a mature age, especially through learning under the constraints of the classroom or computer programs and headphones, enter our memory cleansed of emotions.

Catherine Harris and her colleagues provide interesting evidence of the intuitive feedback that the native language can cause. Using skin conductivity sensors to measure emotional reactions (conductivity increases with adrenaline), they lost to Turkish-speaking people who learned English in adulthood, words and phrases in both languages. Some of them were neutral (the table), others - not very (crap), and still others reprimanded (be ashamed!). Measuring the reaction of the skin showed that the reaction to bad words was stronger than usual, especially when the words were pronounced in Turkish. But most of all, the difference was visible with reprimands. Volunteers reacted calmly to English phrases, and very sharply to Turkish ones, while some seemed to hear these phrases in the voice of their relatives. If language is a container for vivid memories of our misconduct and punishment, it is not surprising that such emotional associations can influence moral values ​​made in their native language.

The balance shifts even more towards this explanation thanks to a study that appeared in the journal Cognition. In this study, according to the scenario, good intentions led to bad results (someone gives a homeless new jacket, which is why the poor fellow is beaten by others who decide that he stole it), or good results come out of ambiguous actions (a couple adopt a disabled person and receive compensation ). With the moral evaluations of these stories, reading them in non-native language led to the fact that the results of the subjects seemed more important than intentions. The results of the study contradict the theory that the use of a foreign language makes people think deeper, since another study showed that careful reflection of the situation leads to an understanding of the advantage of intentions over the results.

But these results are consistent with the fact that when using a foreign language, a muffled emotional reaction — less sympathy for those who had noble intentions, and less hatred for those who had bad motives — reduces the influence of intentions. This explanation is supported by the information that patients with injuries to the median part of the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for emotional reactions, showed a similar reasoning pattern, in which the importance of the results prevailed over the importance of intentions.

What will be the moral core of a person who knows several languages? My moral memories, the consequences of the emotional events that taught me what “good” is? Or are these reasonings that I can apply without the participation of such subconscious restrictions? Or, these studies simply show us the truth about us, regardless of the number of languages ​​we speak: our moral compass works as a combination of the early forces that formed us and our ways of avoiding these forces.