Comments on: Less thinking biases in a foreign tongue

By: bubbarich

bubbarich — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 14:45:36 +0000

Andy, I’ve long thought (based on personal experience) that cognition is built on language. This is more evidence for this.

By: Andy

Andy — Thu, 31 May 2012 18:52:02 +0000

Surprising. I always thought of biases as language independent. When does a language ceases to remain foreign?

By: Sam

Sam — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 03:36:27 +0000

Gosh…obvious really, now that I think about it, but I’d never imagined that other people also think in their second/other languages for problem-solving purposes.

I’ve done this for years – used Spanish instead of my native English to describe and frame a problem that was proving tricky in English.

For me, it works quite well partly because of the need to be more deliberate in vocabulary and partly because Spanish seems to access another element of my personality in a counterbalancing way that also adds new twists or perspectives.

I’m sure there are other aspects, as the authors of this study indicate, that play a role in the variances between decision-making. The imagined/silent audience is one. I’m usually more conscious of this ‘audience’ in Spanish than I am in English.

By: Warren Davies

Warren Davies — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 19:33:00 +0000

Many thanks Jay!!

By: Equiano

Equiano — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 13:36:12 +0000

“FEWER” biases, not “less.”. Sweet Jesus…

By: Jay van Zyl

Jay van Zyl — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 11:27:43 +0000

@Simon & @Warren

I quickly scanned the article, and there were different L1/L2 combinations. The first three experiments had

L1 = English (proficiency 6.9/10)
L2 = Japanese (4.2)

L1 = Korean (8.5)
L2 = English (4.4)

L1 = English (?)
L2 = French (3.8)

The three experiments produced results that were pretty similar. The mean age of all participants was around 22 years; the first group started learning Japanese at mean age 17, the second group started learning English at mean age 12 and the third group started learning French at mean age 16.

By: bubbarich

bubbarich — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 02:47:17 +0000

I don’t know about that, Simon. I’m moderately fluent in Finnish, but I was in my 20s when I learned it. My personality is slightly different in Finnish, because of the social contexts and societies I learned the languages in. I also sense a psychological effect from feeling slightly more emotionally distant in Finnish.

By: Simon Mundy

Simon Mundy — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 01:02:26 +0000

Lots of follow up studies there, all needing to be replicated! I like bubbarich’s points about the necessary differences in neural substrate of formulation and deciding “in” the later learned language and LC’s cultural caveat as well.

When I was temporarily a Hebrew speaker I was also markedly more assertive than my (then) quiet English self. That raises the question though of what constitutes a decision in the original study.

Does it make sense to talk of character-free decisions? Mind/Brain again, bubbarich?

By: LC

LC — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 18:50:48 +0000

I speak 5 languages with varying degrees of fluency. Warren is correct that there are different biases and values that one tends to assume to some degree in switching between languages. Some of this has to do with how ideas are typically expressed in a given language and the connotations embedded in words involved in the decision-making process. But IME much more has to do with the values and realities of the *culture* associated with the language. (I’m much more aggressive–if no less skeptical–in making decisions when operating in Chinese than in French, for example, because life in China requires it, while extensive, discursive analysis is normative in France.)

By: bubbarich

bubbarich — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 15:31:49 +0000

Unless it’s a very early-acquired 2nd language (ie, true bilingualism), then the circuitry is necessarily going to be very different as the language is in a different part of the brain. I’m not much of a person for conflating mind and brain, but in this case the anatomical differences of language storage are so different that there MUST be psychological differences.