The Foreign Language Effect On Prosocial Behavioral Judgement

Recent studies have investigated that humans cognitive processing on decision-making and moral judgment will change with different expression forms of language(native language/ foreign language),which was named Foreign Language Effect by the researchers.With the development of world integration,people need to make decisions under different languages.While,different expression forms of language have a great impact on multiple decision-making,eg.risk-taking and Hot-Hand Effect.And these days,prosocial decision-making becomes hot debated due to that prosociality plays a very important role in the stability of social.The previous study found that imagining the scene of helping the people in the context will facilitate prosocial decision-making.So this study will use the paradigm followed the previous study,aiming to investigate whether different expression forms of language have the great impact on prosocial decision-making.Study 1 adopt single factor with two levels design to explore the foreign language effect on prosocial decision-making and the underlying mechanism.Furthermore,given that the degree of emergency can influence the prosocial behavior.Study 2 was design to investigate the impact of the degree of emergency on the result of study 1.We found that prosocial decision-making will change with different expression forms of language(native language/ foreign language);people using foreign language(M = 4.21,SD = 0.70)do less prosocial decision-making than using native language(M = 4.98,SD = 0.38),which due to different degree of scene imagery on clearness and detail and the different degree of emotion enrollment.Study 2 indicated that people would do more prosocial decision-making under emergency situation(M = 5.63,SD = 0.14)than non-emergency situation(M = 4.84,SD = 0.15),in which people using native language under emergency situation make the most prosocial decisions while people using foreign language under non-emergency situation make the least prosocial decisions.We found the existence of EFL on prosocial decision-making and the emotion enrollment is the underlying mechanism.