Your Morals Depend on Language

Abstract

Should you sacrifice one man to save five? Whatever your answer, it should not depend on whether you were asked the question in your native language or a foreign tongue so long as you understood the problem. And yet here we report evidence that people using a foreign language make substantially more utilitarian decisions when faced with such moral dilemmas. We argue that this stems from the reduced emotional response elicited by the foreign language, consequently reducing the impact of intuitive emotional concerns. In general, we suggest that the increased psychological distance of using a foreign language induces utilitarianism. This shows that moral judgments can be heavily affected by an orthogonal property to moral principles, and importantly, one that is relevant to hundreds of millions of individuals on a daily basis.

Full text

Your Morals Depend on Language
Albert Costa
1,2
*, Alice Foucart
1
, Sayuri Hayakawa
3
, Melina Aparici
4
, Jose Apesteguia
2,5
, Joy Heafner
6
,
Boaz Keysar
3
1Center of Brain and Cognition, CBC, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain, 2Institucio
´Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avanc¸ats (ICREA), Barcelona, Spain,
3Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, United States of America, 4Departament de Psicologia Ba
`sica, Evolutiva i de l’Educacio
´, Universitat
Auto
`noma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain, 5Department of Economics, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain, 6Department of Human Development and Family
Studies, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut, United States of America
Abstract
Should you sacrifice one man to save five? Whatever your answer, it should not depend on whether you were asked the
question in your native language or a foreign tongue so long as you understood the problem. And yet here we report
evidence that people using a foreign language make substantially more utilitarian decisions when faced with such moral
dilemmas. We argue that this stems from the reduced emotional response elicited by the foreign language, consequently
reducing the impact of intuitive emotional concerns. In general, we suggest that the increased psychological distance of
using a foreign language induces utilitarianism. This shows that moral judgments can be heavily affected by an orthogonal
property to moral principles, and importantly, one that is relevant to hundreds of millions of individuals on a daily basis.
Citation: Costa A, Foucart A, Hayakawa S, Aparici M, Apesteguia J, et al. (2014) Your Morals Depend on Language. PLoS ONE 9(4): e94842. doi:10.1371/journal.
pone.0094842
Editor: Mariano Sigman, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina
Received December 11, 2013; Accepted March 4, 2014; Published April 23, 2014
Copyright: ß2014 Costa et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits
unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Funding: This research was partially supported by grants from the Spanish Government (PSI2011-23033, CONSOLIDER-INGENIO2010 CSD2007-00048, ECO2011-
25295, and ECO2010-09555-E), from the Catalan Government (SGR 2009-1521), from the 7th Framework Programme (AThEME 613465), the University of Chicago’s
Wisdom Research Project and the John Templeton Foundation, a National Science Foundation grant BCS-0849034, and *Language Learning*’s Small Grants
Research Program. Alice Foucart was supported by a post-doctoral fellowship from the Catalan Government (Beatriu de Pinos). The funders had no role in study
design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
* E-mail: costalbert@gmail.com
Introduction
People often believe that moral judgments about ‘‘right’’ and
‘‘wrong’’ are the result of deep, thoughtful principles and should
therefore be consistent and unaffected by irrelevant aspects of a
moral dilemma. For instance, as long as one understands a moral
dilemma, its resolution should not depend on whether it is
presented in a native language or in a foreign language. 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.
According to some models of moral psychology, moral
judgment is driven by a complex interaction of at least two forces:
intuitive ‘‘automatic’’ processes prompted by the emotional
content of a given dilemma, and rational, effortful, controlled
processes driven by the conscious evaluation of the potential
outcomes [1–3]. In this dual process account, intuitive processes
generally support judgments that favor the essential rights of a
person (deontological judgments), while rational controlled pro-
cesses seem to support judgments favoring the greater good
(utilitarian judgments), regardless of whether or not they violate an
individual’s rights [4–11]. The relative weight of intuitive and
rational processes in moral judgments can vary, and lead to more
or less deontological or utilitarian judgments. As such, establishing
which conditions favor each of these two mechanisms is
fundamental to understanding the psychology of morality (for a
review, see [12]). 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.
There are good reasons to expect that using a foreign language
would reduce utilitarian resolutions of moral dilemmas. For
example, there is evidence that utilitarian choice relies on
controlled processes that require cognitive resources, and that an
increase of cognitive load [6] or stress [13,14] reduces utilitarian
choice in moral dilemmas. The added cognitive load and anxiety
of using a foreign language could therefore reduce the use of
controlled processes and subsequently reduce utilitarian choice.
That is, to the extent that utilitarian choice reveals a higher
contribution of controlled processes and such processes require the
recruitment of cognitive resources, then conditions that increase
cognitive load such as the use of a foreign language should
decrease utilitarian choice.
Despite this potential impact of cognitive load, we propose that
using a foreign language results in the opposite, that it actually
increases utilitarian choice. In general, a foreign language elicits
less intense emotional reactions relative to a native language [15–
18]. For example, skin conductance responses as well as the
perceived force of emotional phrases are reduced when presented
in a foreign language compared to a native language [19].
Additionally, heuristic biases that are driven by emotional factors,
such as loss aversion, are reduced when people make decisions in a
foreign language [20,21]. Such reduced emotionality, we argue,
promotes a more reasoned, controlled process that leads to a
utilitarian choice.
Hence, we hypothesize that moral judgments in a foreign
language would be less affected by the emotional reactivity elicited
by a dilemma. This hypothesis makes a clear prediction: when
faced with moral dilemmas in a foreign language, utilitarian
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judgments should be more common than in a native language. We
tested this prediction in two experiments using the well-known
trolley dilemma [22].
Experiment 1
We used the ‘‘footbridge’’ version of the trolley dilemma [23],
where one imagines standing on a footbridge overlooking a train
track. A small on-coming train is about to kill five people and the
only way to stop it is to push a heavy man off the footbridge in
front of the train. This will kill him, but save the five people. A
utilitarian analysis dictates sacrificing one to save five; but this
would violate the moral prohibition against killing, and imagining
physically pushing the man is emotionally difficult and therefore
people routinely avoid that [6,24]. If we are correct, then people
would be more likely to opt for sacrificing one man to save five
when dealing with such moral dilemmas in a foreign language
than in their native tongue.
Method
Participants. We collected data from several native/foreign
language populations: English/Spanish (N = 112) in the US,
Korean/English (N = 80) in Korea, English/French (N = 107) in
France, and Spanish or English/Hebrew (N = 18) in Israel. The
native language varied in Israel because we recruited participants
in a school for learning Hebrew. Participants were late learners of
the foreign language who did not grow up speaking it at home.
Sufficient proficiency to understand the instructions was assessed
through comprehension checks. Proficiency and background
information are included in Table 1. Participation was voluntary
and the experimental protocol was approved by the IRB of the
Social Sciences Division of the University of Chicago. Seventy-two
additional participants were excluded because they either failed to
comprehend the scenario (N = 41), grew up with the language
(N = 16), did not clearly indicate an answer (N = 3), or were not
native speakers of the native language (N = 12).
Procedure and materials. All materials were translated
from English and back-translated for comparability [25]. The
consent form, materials and conversation with the experimenter
were in the assigned language. Participants read a packet with the
scenario and a cartoon depiction of the scene. After they indicated
their decision, they answered questions regarding demographic
and language background, and the foreign language packet
contained a comprehension check. Crucially, within each
language-pair group, participants were randomly assigned to
either their native tongue (N = 158) or a foreign language
(N = 159).
Results and Discussion
Across all populations more participants selected the utilitarian
choice, to save five by killing one, when using the foreign language
than their native tongue (Table 2). The difference between the
foreign and the native language condition ranged from 7.5
percentage points to 65 percentage points. Taking a weighted
average across populations, we find that the rate of utilitarian
decisions in a foreign language was increased by more than half
compared to the native tongue (from 20% to 33%; x
2
(1,
N = 317) = 6.9, p,.01, Q= .148).
While for all four language groups in this experiment the
pattern was in the predicted direction, we note two things that are
worth considering. First, none of the Korean participants in the
native language condition chose to push the man, which might
seem unusual. This could reflect a cultural prohibition, and is
consistent with the finding that East Asians are less likely to select
the utilitarian choice with such dilemmas [26]. Despite this, the
Korean group showed a 7.5 pp difference between the native and
foreign language. The second thing to note is the unusually high
difference for the group who used Hebrew as a foreign language.
While the other three groups showed a modest difference between
the native and foreign conditions of 7.5, 13, and 16 percentage
points, that group showed a large 65 pp difference. Most likely this
is an artifact of the small size of that group (N = 18) and should not
be interpreted as reflecting any special quality of that group. To
make sure our results are not determined by this group we re-
analyzed the data without it and found the same pattern. Of
people using their native language, 21% made the utilitarian
decision as compared to 31% using a foreign language, x
2
(1,
N = 299) = 4.0, p,.05.
The results support the hypothesis that the reduced emotional
resonance of a foreign language leads individuals to be less affected
by an emotional aversion to pushing the man, allowing them to
make more utilitarian decisions. Experiment 2 replicated the effect
and evaluated two alternative explanations.
Experiment 2
We considered the following two alternative explanations to
Experiment 1. First, because a foreign language is more difficult,
participants are more likely to respond at random. Given that only
20% of the participants made the utilitarian choice when using a
native tongue, occasional random responding would push the
Table 1. Experiment 19s participants’ details.
Percentage Female 53%
Mean age 21 yrs
Mean age of FL acquisition 14 yrs
Self-rated proficiency in the foreign language
(1 = least fluent, 5 = most fluent)
Written comprehension 3.1
Written production 2.8
Oral production 2.6
Oral comprehension 2.9
The specific age at time of experiment and self-rated proficiency was not collected for the French sample. However, all of these participants were undergraduate
students whose ages ranged from 18–23 at the time of the experiment.
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0094842.t001
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proportion upward towards 50%. If this is true, then our findings
are not due to reduced emotional reactions but to a response
pattern. To evaluate this, we included a version of the trolley
dilemma that is much less emotional [22]. In this ‘‘switch’’
dilemma, the trolley is headed towards the five men, but you can
switch it to another track where it would kill only one man. People
are more willing to sacrifice the one man by pulling the switch
than by pushing him off the footbridge, and one of the primary
reasons is that pulling the switch is less emotionally aversive [5]. If
reduced emotional reactions determine our effect, we should not
find an effect of language in the less emotional switch dilemma. If
it is random responding, we should find a reversed effect, as
random response should push utilitarian choice down towards
50%.
A second alternative explanation assumes that people might be
more utilitarian not because of the language per-se but because of
cultural norms. For example, Spanish-speaking societies tend to be
more collectivistic than English speaking societies [27,28]. If using
Spanish primes such norms, it could lead one to prefer the
common good over the rights of individuals. This could have led
participants in Experiment 1 who used Spanish as a foreign
language to push the man to his death more, not because of the
foreign-ness of the language but because of its associated norms.
The multitude of the native/foreign language pairs we used makes
this alternative less likely, but it is important to evaluate it directly.
Experiment 2 did so by crossing language and native-ness, using
both Spanish/English and English/Spanish populations.
Method
Participants. Data from 725 participants are included in the
analyses, including 397 native speakers of Spanish with English as
a foreign language, and 328 native speakers of English with
Spanish as a foreign language. The study was conducted in
classrooms. Agreement from the teachers and students to conduct
the study was obtained prior to the day of the study. In the
classroom, participants were verbally informed about the study. It
was emphasized that participation was voluntary and anonymous,
and that participation could be aborted at any time. The study was
part of a project approved by the ethics committee (Comite´ Etic
d’Investigacio Clinica, Parc de Salut Mar, Barcelona), who also
waived the need for written informed consent from the partici-
pants. Participants provided their verbal informed consent and
freely decided to take part in the study or not. If they decided to
take part, the only personal information they were required to
provide was their age, gender, and native language. Native
Spanish participants who had spent more than 10 months in an
English speaking country were excluded. At the end of each
problem, participants were asked to rate their understanding of the
problem (regarding language); those who rated it less than 50%
were excluded from the study. Thus, all participants included in
these studies had a moderate level of proficiency in their foreign
language. Participants’ background and proficiency information
are provided in Table 3.
Materials. The materials included the footbridge and the
switch dilemmas but no pictures. Each participant received two
dilemmas, the footbridge and the switch dilemmas, with the order
counterbalanced across participants.
Procedure. The study was conducted in classrooms of 10 to
50 students with various backgrounds (e.g., psychology, neurosci-
ence, criminology, linguistics, media, architecture, education).
Participants received the instructions and then the two dilemmas
either in their native language or the foreign one. All students
within each classroom performed the task in the same language.
The order of presentation was counter-balanced across partici-
pants. It was emphasized that there was no incorrect answer and
that the choice was personal. The experimenter stayed in the
classroom during the whole session, which lasted about 10
minutes.
Results and Discussion
We analyzed the choices for the footbridge and the switch
problem separately. For the footbridge dilemma, participants’
choices were strikingly different depending on the native-ness of
the language (Figure 1). While only 18% of the participants
decided to push the man to his death when using their native
tongue, fully 44% of them chose to push him when using a foreign
language, x
2
(1, N = 725) = 57.3, p,.001. These results replicate
the results of Experiment 1 and show an even larger difference,
from a 13 percentage-point increase in utilitarian choices in
Experiment 1, to 26 percentage points in Experiment 2.
Reduced emotionality or random responding?. Recall
that the switch dilemma is much less emotional and that in general
people predominantly choose the utilitarian option. Indeed, our
participants preferred to divert the train, killing one person to save
five, both in their native (81%) and foreign (80%) language (x
2
(1,
N = 725) = 0.03; p= .85; Figure 1). This was true with English or
Spanish as the foreign language (Figure 2). So while a foreign
language increased utilitarian choices with the emotional foot-
bridge dilemma, it did not have an effect on the ‘‘colder’’ switch
dilemma. This is consistent with our assumption that a foreign
language increases utilitarianism by increasing emotional distance,
but given the high level of utilitarian choices it could also reflect a
ceiling effect.
More importantly, these results allow us to evaluate whether a
foreign language simply increases the tendency to respond
randomly. While the results for the footbridge dilemma are
consistent with this account, the results of the switch dilemma
contradict it. Given the 81% rate of utilitarian choice with the
Table 2. Percentage of Utilitarian Decisions by Language Condition in Experiment 1.
Languages Percent of utilitarian decisions
Native Foreign Native Foreign
Korean English 0% 7.5%
English Spanish 28% 44%
English/Spanish Hebrew 10% 75%
English French 20% 33%
Weighted Average 20% 33%
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0094842.t002
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native language in the switch dilemma, random responding would
predict a reduction in utilitarian choice with a foreign language.
There is no hint of such a reduction, strongly arguing against this
alternative explanation.
Evaluating a cultural explanation. Crossing the languages
in Experiment 2 allows us to evaluate the second alternative
explanation for the results of Experiment 1, which suggested that
the willingness to sacrifice the man depended on the culture that is
associated with the language, not on the native-ness of the
language. The results from Experiment 2 do not support this claim
as the effect of language for the footbridge dilemma was
independent of the native tongue of the participants and of the
culture associated with the language of the session. Participants
made more utilitarian choices in Spanish (40%) than English
(18%) when Spanish was foreign (x
2
(1, N = 328) = 20.90, p,
.0001), but more utilitarian decisions in English (47%) than
Spanish (19%) when English was foreign (x
2
(1, N = 397) = 37.14,
p,.0001; Figure 2). This pattern clearly contradicts a cultural
explanation to our findings.
With increased proficiency, a foreign language could become
more emotionally grounded [15]. We conducted a post-hoc
analysis, splitting participants according to their self-rated profi-
ciency level as either above-average or below-average. The pattern
suggested that the increase in utilitarian judgments for the more
emotional footbridge dilemma depends somewhat on the profi-
ciency in the foreign language. The increment in utilitarian
responses in a foreign language, although present for both
proficiency groups, was larger for lower (32 percentage-points)
than for higher proficiency participants (20 percentage-points; see
Figure 3). The difference between the lower and the higher
proficiency groups was significant (x
2
(1, N = 365) = 5.11, p,.02).
A potential caveat when interpreting these results is that
participants might not have properly understood the text in a
foreign language. This is unlikely because the effect of the foreign
language differed between the switch and footbridge problems,
and participants reported having a good understanding of the
problems. More importantly, a subgroup of participants
(N = 237 for foreign; N = 218 for native) also received the
Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT; [29]), a test of logical reasoning
Table 3. Experiment 29s participants’ details.
Native Spanish Speakers (N = 197) Native English Speakers (N = 168)
Percentage Female 71% 73%
Mean age 21 yrs (range 18–33) 21 yrs (range 18–28)
Mean age of FL acquisition 8.4 yrs 12 yrs
Months Immersed in the foreign language country 1.1 mths 2.8 mths
Self-rated proficiency in the foreign language
(1 = least fluent, 7 = most fluent)
Written comprehension 5.3 4.9
Written production 4.6 4.6
Oral production 4.2 4.1
Oral comprehension 5.3 5.1
Self-rated understanding of the problem 87.3% 84.7%
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0094842.t003
Figure 1. Percentage of utilitarian decisions (Experiment 2). Percentage of utilitarian decisions for the two versions of the trolley problem in
the native language condition and the foreign language condition.
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0094842.g001
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composed of three problems. Among these participants, those
using a foreign language actually outperformed those using a
native language in logical reasoning, with 60% and 47% of
participants providing at least one correct answer out of three,
respectively. Therefore, we are confident that participants’ level of
proficiency was sufficient for full understanding of the text, and
that the results are due to the emotional distance that the foreign
language provides rather than lack of comprehension.
General Discussion
We have shown that people’s moral judgments and decisions
depend on the native-ness of the language in which a dilemma is
presented, becoming more utilitarian in a foreign language. These
results are important for models of moral decision making because
they show that identical dilemmas may elicit different moral
judgements depending on a seemingly irrelevant aspect such as the
native-ness of the language. Most likely, a foreign language
reduces emotional reactivity, promoting cost-benefit consider-
ations, leading to an increase in utilitarian judgments.
The reduction of the emotionality elicited by a foreign language
may promote psychological distance in general. Increasing
psychological distance leads individuals to construe situations in
more abstract terms, which in some circumstances aligns with
more utilitarian decision making [30,31]. For instance, a more
abstract mind-set is associated with a greater focus on ends than
means, leading to more utilitarian decisions in moral dilemmas like
the footbridge problem [32].
Another factor that may contribute to the effect of a foreign
language on moral judgement is cognitive fluency. Studies have
shown that disrupting cognitive fluency or slowing down decisions
decreases decision biases by moving individuals to a more careful
and deliberative mode of processing [33,34]. Given that using a
Figure 2. Percentage of utilitarian decisions by language group (Experiment 2). Percentage of utilitarian decisions for the two versions of
the trolley problem in the native language condition and the foreign language condition, divided by native language group. Native Spanish speakers
using Spanish (N = 200) or English (N = 197); native English speakers using English (N = 168) or Spanish (N = 160).
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0094842.g002
Figure 3. Percentage of utilitarian decisions by proficiency (Experiment 2). Percentage of utilitarian decisions for the two versions of the
trolley problem in the native language condition and the foreign language condition, divided by self-rated proficiency level.
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0094842.g003
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foreign language could reduce cognitive fluency [35,36], it might
diminish the impact of intuitive processes on moral judgment.
That said, our results suggest that the emotional reaction has an
impact above and beyond it. According to the logic of the CRT,
the worse the performance is on the task, the more people are
using intuitive rather than controlled processes. For individuals
who performed the worst on the CRT task and solved none of the
three problems, using a foreign language increased utilitarian
choices by 27 percentage points. This increase was virtually
identical to the overall impact of a foreign language (26 percentage
points). This suggests that the effect persists for moral judgments
even when the foreign language is not disfluent enough to disrupt
intuitive problem solving as indicated by the CRT.
Note, however, that we did find an effect of language
proficiency on the percentage of utilitarian choices in Experiment
2. That is, the more proficient the participants considered
themselves in the foreign language the more their decision
patterns resembled that of the native speakers. In our view, this
result suggests that increasing foreign language proficiency may
promote emotional grounding, hence eliciting similar emotional
reactions to that of a native language. Future studies could
evaluate this interpretation as it makes a clear prediction that
highly proficient foreign language speakers should show a
markedly reduced foreign language effect on moral judgments.
All the accounts above have in common the notion that moral
dilemmas faced in a foreign language may promote deliberative
processes and reduce emotionally-driven responses. Hence, they fit
very well with models of moral decision making that consider
moral judgments as the result of the interplay of intuitive
emotionally driven processes and rational thoughtful processes
[1–3]. The results are also consistent with the notion that in some
cases decision making in a foreign language could be less affected
by intuitive heuristics.
This discovery has important consequences for our globalized
world as many individuals make moral judgments in both native
and foreign languages. 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.
Foreign languages are used in international, multilingual forums
such as the United Nations, the European Union, large investment
firms and international corporations in general. Moral choices
within these domains can be explained better, and are made more
predictable by our discovery. Indeed, awareness of the impact of
the native-ness of the language on moral dilemmas is fundamental
to making more informed choices. Whether you believe that
adherence to moral rules is a better choice or that a utilitarian
cost-benefit analysis is the better one [12,37], regardless of your
morals, your decisions should not be a function of the native-ness
of the language you are using. It shouldn’t matter if you are
considering the life of ‘‘the large man’’ or of ‘‘el hombre grande.’’
But it does matter. Given that what we have discovered is
surprising and unintuitive, increasing awareness of the impact of
using a foreign language may help us check our decision-making
context and make choices that are based on the things that should
really matter.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the Council on International Educational
Exchange as well as the teachers from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra,
the Universitat de Barcelona, the Universitat Auto`noma de Barcelona and
the Universidad de Ma´laga for helping us collect the data by giving us
access to their students. We would also like to thank our colleagues for their
useful comments.
Author Contributions
Conceived and designed the experiments: AC AF SH JA BK. Performed
the experiments: AF SH MA JH. Analyzed the data: AC AF SH MA JA JH
BK. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: AC AF SH MA JA JH
BK. Wrote the paper: AC AF SH JA BK.
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