The Foreign Language Effect In Moral Judgment: The Increased Deliberation Account Or The Reduced Intuition Account?

In daily life,decision-making as the process of identifying and choosing alternatives based on the values and benefits happens frequently.Usually,people make judgments and decisions in their mother tongue.However,with the development of globalization,there're much more judgments and decisions based on communications in foreign languages.So making judgments and decisions in a foreign language have become increasingly common.Since Keysar,Hayakawa and An(2012)revealed the foreign language effect that decision making is affected by the language presented in a given problem(native vs.foreign),the existence of this effect has been largely documented in the fields of uncertain decision making and moral judgment.Based on the dual-process model,researchers proposed a reduced intuition(i.e.,affect)account and an increased deliberation(i.e.,cognition)account to explain the mental mechanisms of foreign language effect and these assumptions,to a certain extent,have been supported by the results of some experimental research.However,both deliberation and intuition inclination cannot be directly and independently measured in current research paradigm,so the current research still cannot answer which account is appropriate.Hence,it remains to address whether the reduced intuition and the increased deliberation contribute to the foreign language effect jointly,or just one of them has the most efficacy?The current study used 3 experiments to investigate the foreign language effect in the moral dilemma judgment and its mental mechanism,based on the model of dual processes.Here,the process dissociation procedure which is able to measure the strength of two different processes was first used,then an experimental manipulation to interfere with negative affect as the intuition process or prime the contribution of cognition process,to address the roles of deliberation and intuition in the foreign language effect.The main conclusions are as follows:(1)The foreign language effect exists in Chinese-English bilinguals with Chinese as na?ve language.Participants tended to make utilitarian judgment in the foreign language(i.e.,English),which means favoring the aggregate welfare over the welfare of fewer individuals.(2)The promoted deliberative process is the leading cause for the foreign language effect.As suggested above,the moral foreign language effect in which the utilitarian judgment is increased during using foreign language is mainly caused by the increased deliberate process.The present study has a theoretical significance for addressing the role of language in human's cognition,and can help us understand more about the dual-process model.