Washington, May 23 (ANI): People who think problems through in a foreign language - and it doesn't matter which one - make more rational decisions and are more apt to take smart risks, especially in the financial realm, according to a recent study.
Left to follow their gut instincts, people are naturally loss-averse, sometimes myopically so, and often pass up favourable opportunities as a result, said Boaz Keysar, a psychologist at the University of Chicago and lead author of the study.
"Imagine I offer you 100 dollars, or we flip a coin and if it's heads, you get 200 dollars, and if it's tails, you get nothing," the ABC News quoted Keysar as saying.
"Most people would say, 'I'll take the 100 dollars and not risk getting nothing. Ninety-nine percent of people would do that, even if I offer 2,200 dollars or nothing. We have an emotional reaction to a definite, immediate gain," he added.
But consider the proposal in Korean, French, Spanish, Japanese - any non-native tongue - and the aversion to losses diminishes, and our willingness to take risks changes, Keysar and his research team found.
"A foreign language is less emotionally connected than our native tongue, and distances you," said Keysar, who, even after 25 years in the United States, says he still "operates differently" in English than in his native Hebrew.
"A non-native language takes you away cognitively and slows you down, especially if you're not that skilled in it," he stated.
In one of six experiments to gauge just how different, Keysar and colleagues enlisted 54 University of Chicago students who were native English speakers but had been studying Spanish. They gave each student 15 dollars in 1-dollar bills to make 15 separate bets in a coin toss.
In each toss, they could either pass up the bet and keep the dollar, or risk losing it for the possibility of getting an extra 1.50 dollars if they won the toss, or nothing if they lost. These were advantageous bets, Keysar explained, as statistically, the students stood to come out ahead if they took all 15 bets.
While the students who considered the wager in Spanish took the bet 71 percent of the time, those who thought it through in English were willing to wager only 54 percent of the time.
"Bear in mind that we gave them the 15 dollars. It's not as if it was even their own money. But in the foreign language, they were not as motivated by fear," Keysar noted.
While not involved in the Chicago study, Benjamin Bergen, director of the Language and Cognition Lab at the University of California at San Diego, said, "There's a lot of evidence that people have strong emotional reactions to words in their native language. Even if they're fluent, bilingual, words they've acquired early on in life, on their caregiver's knee, really have more impact on them.
"But what's the exact mechanism at work? Why do you show more of these signs of irrationality in your native language at the level of the brain? It leaves many questions open."
Some clues might lie in past studies on "taboo" words that measured people's electro-physiological responses to hearing swears in their own language and in a foreign language. People reacted with less emotion - and less sweat - to these words in a foreign language.
"Those words go to some deep levels of emotion that are inaccessible in the second language," said Evelina Fedorenko, a research scientist in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT.
As a native Russian speaker, Fedorenko stated, "I can relate to that. Swear words in English just do nothing for me at all. I'm totally insensitive to them even though I think in English, I count in English, I dream in English. But I would never swear in Russian."
Whatever the mechanism at work, Keysar is quick to point out that distancing people emotionally from important decisions is not always the best course, and is studying when the opposite is true.
"We have an emotional system for a reason. It's not something that's just there in the way," he added.
The finding was published in the journal Psychological Science. (ANI)
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