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0‘I couldn’t believe the data’: how thinking in a foreign language improves decision-making
Research shows people who speak another language are more utilitarian and flexible, less risk-averse and egotistical, and better able to cope with traumatic memories
Sept 17, 2023, The Guardian
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As Vladimir Nabokov revised his autobiography, Speak, Memory, he found himself in a strange psychological state. He had first written the book in English, published in 1951. A few years later, a New York publisher asked him to translate it back into Russian for the émigré community. The use of his mother tongue brought back a flood of new details from his childhood, which he converted into his adopted language for a final edition, published in 1966.
“This re-Englishing of a Russian re-version of what had been an English re-telling of Russian memories in the first place, proved to be a diabolical task,” he wrote. “But some consolation was given me by the thought that such multiple metamorphosis, familiar to butterflies, had not been tried by any human before.”
Over the past decade, psychologists have become increasingly interested in using such mental metamorphoses. Besides altering the quality of our memories, switching between languages can influence people’s financial decision-making and their appraisal of moral dilemmas. By speaking a second language, we can even become more rational, more open-minded and better equipped to deal with uncertainty. This phenomenon is known as the “foreign language effect” and the benefits may be an inspiration for anyone who would like to enrich their mind with the words of another tongue.
The foreign language effect should not be confused with the older concept of “linguistic determinism”, which proposes that the specific words and grammar of a language can change the way we perceive the world. In this view, people’s colour perception should change according to the terms that we use to divide the rainbow, while people’s perception of time may be influenced by the grammatical tenses they use.
You may be familiar with this idea from the film Arrival, in which the aliens’ language mysteriously shapes their experience of the world. Whether this happens in real life, however, is still a matter of considerable scientific debate. The foreign language effect does not depend on the particular features of the language that someone speaks; instead, it is concerned with the general experience of moving from a first to a second language. How will my thinking change, for example, when I move from English, which I absorbed in my cot, to Italian, which I have painstakingly studied as an adult?
