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This was an uneventful read. The findings are inconclusive and the assumptions are not surprising. Having less emotional connection to a second language is pretty easy to assume.

Interesting topic to research though. I wish there was more experiments to really get to the core of morality in multilingual people instead of emotional / comprehension struggles. It seems like they are linking morality to these instead of seeing these things as hindering actual morality considerations from happening.

Well, it seems like a language effect on ethical decisionmaking definitely exists, even if the reason for it isn’t understood yet.

I haven’t read the original journal articles that this one referenced yet, but I wonder if they need to repeat the study with fluently multilingual people. That would remove the effect that the work of comprehension might have.

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It would seem to me the difference is picked up from the exposure to a different culture while learning the language and how it differs from your native one. Not really much to do with thinking in that actual language.

This is really interesting. Thank you for sharing!

Interesting, but wouldn’t it be better to do this with native bilingual speakers only? Isn’t this a bit like testing if step siblings have similar traits despite growing up apart from each other?

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I wrote my linguistics thesis on a topic that overlapped with this, though I specifically looked at swearing/taboo. Research suggests that there's a bit of an emotional disconnect with L2 - when everyone present understands all languages in use, speakers tend to swear in their 2nd language. There's similar patterns in conversation around trauma - L2 allows people to talk about their experiences/exposure to sensitive stimuli while maintaining their composure. I think that trying to bring morality into would compromise how much the multilingual factor can be considered. We have a lot of ways to pick at language and language in use in linguistics but we can never get deeper than what we can actually see and hear. Internal factors like morality are beyond that. We can see that people tend to do this or that, and we can narrow down to key contextual features that predict when it'll happen, but reading morality into it is a step too far into subjectivity (and not the one we like in linguistics).

Umm.. I may be wrong, but isn't less about language and more about culture?

I've got a decent handful of international clients and I speak German and understand Spanish. I swear I've got more than one German client who is genuinely significantly friendlier and more agreeable when speaking in English than when speaking in German. Then I've got one Spanish client who seems to be a lot more direct when speaking in Spanish than in English... Add in cultural differences and it's a miracle the global economy functions as smoothly as it does.

At my old company our territories used to be really broad, but we finally had to tighten them up because of how different sales executives pitches had to be even between neighboring countries, where if you aren't used to dealing with them specifically you can be next to useless. Like, I had eastern Asia as one of my territories when I first started at my old company. Had always prided myself on being able to overcome any objection, and was in a meeting where one of the guys was trying to take 1 more week to talk more to our competitor even though his team wanted to move forward. That's a problem I've dealt with 100 times, no big deal, so I ask why he needs to work with them more first when we are beating them on every box. His response is "because I said I would give them a strong chance, so to stop now would dishonor the spirit of my ancestors." At which point my only option is to go get sushi because I got nothing for objections regarding the honor of one's ancestral spirits.

I have had several experiences with Germans who are friendly and polite in English, but when they find out I speak German, say, "How nice for you," and proceed to feel like they can be more frank with me about how they really feel about the people with us or the setting.

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It's truly wild how inconsistent and random our brains really are, how much of our decisions are based on weird aspects we don't know or think about. Especially people who tend to think they are always right usually have no idea why they think this or that.

And yea, languages definitely make a difference in how we think.

The part about hearing reprimands in the relatives' voices is pretty telling too. Nobody is really their own person through and through.

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I'm dissapointed to read little mentioned of truly bilingual people who are surely the best place to study anything like this?

If you're a shaky foreign language speaker then of course you must think before speaking more and engage different parts of the brain .

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I'm multilingual and bilingual in French and English, and can guarantee there's the added layer of time and experience. Not everyone is multilingual from being raised that way. Some of us travel to such L2 speaking countries and become fluent there. It's getting to live in a completely different culture, being exposed to new ideas and ways of life. Of course this would affect your morality.

I don't have the same moral compass I used to have 10 years ago when I wasn't multilingual.

Can you elaborate on what changed for you? In respect to your moral compass, what is one thing you see differently now?

I know this is anecdotal, but I'm Armenian-American, and I've noticed my emotional reaction to certain events, such as road rage, or disagreement with a sibling, can be more sever when I speak or think in my native tongue, rather than expressing my feelings in English.

I don't necessarily believe my morality changes when I alternate between English and Armenian, but I do find it a lot easier to express my emotions in Armenian than with English, but when I process information in English I can actually pause and think before I speak, which can be more beneficial for situations where your words can do more harm than good.

Article:

> Or perhaps, this line of research simply illuminates what is true for all of us, regardless of how many languages we speak: that our moral compass is a combination of the earliest forces that have shaped us and the ways in which we escape them.

This makes no sense. If people were asked to do something evil in one language, they would say "yes", but if they were asked to do the same evil in another language, they would say "no".

In a weird way, I find it easier to flirt with the opposite sex in a different language

Coming from France and moving to countries like NZ, Australia and the UK, I was exposed to a LOT of feminism and gender theory that I had simply never had come my way before. It was also due to working and living with a lot of more queer people than I had in France.

Feminism, in particular, was a tough thing at the start. I lived with a Canadian woman who was extremely patient with me. And I'm AFAB! (all that mulling on the topic over years made me realise I'm Agender, which makes so much sense in retrospect..)

I had badly ingrained "not like other girls" mentality, and though I mostly didn't mind people doing their own thing, I had prejudices without foundation that needed to be addressed. I'd simply never had had them confronted before.

There was also the country hopping element. Making a home somewhere, never wanting to leave, and being forced to by visa restrictions... It was a whole lot of emotional roller coaster. Also forced exposure to a lot of different politics and political systems.

And then I lived and worked in a hostel for over 3 years! The tribal dynamics, community life, people coming and going, teaching you things about their culture or themselves...

And them also being way behind on topics you used to struggle with, and suddenly it's your turn to be patient and explain a topic you used to never think about...

Lots of personal growth.

My lifestyle, travelling from one work holiday visa to another, living in people's backyards and hostels and such, leads to a lot of socialisation.

I've also been dirt poor... Like doing the bins and living in a tent poor. 20$ in my bank account and homeless in all but name. That too, really changes your perspective on a lot of things.

Let alone, simply 10 years less mature. It's very complicated I imagine, moreso than anything here is making it out to be.

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One thing I'm sure of is that anybody who thinks they're always right is certainly wrong.

Language catalyzes thought as it enables, facilitates, and discourages different thinking chains and pathways naturally due to structure. Finnish has more verb precision than English, but English has better nouns and adjectives.

But to make statements on morality, I think you would need to control for culture.

As an example, I’m quieter when I speak Finnish. But that has nothing to do with Finnish having an inherent volume. It has to do with Finnish culture, which I was immersed in whenever I spoke or listened to Finnish.

I also get more laid back when I talk with someone from Mississippi because that’s how it was and how I was when I lived there. Is a regional accent “language,” or is it a memory connecting a culture or experience to the present moment? Maybe both?

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If you're a sentimentalist about ethics, and a constructionist about emotions, then it makes a lot of sense that a person's moral judgments would be different in another language.

I think the way this would work is something like: I witness an event that evokes an affective state based on my expectations and past experience with things I categorize as "similar." Then, I label my affective state with an emotion word. Then, based on that label, I engage in behaviour that I've learned is an appropriate response to that label. In this case, the behaviour would be making a moral judgment I guess.

It's true that the emotions and behavioural response are culturally learned, but also my internal concept of "angry" might be different from my concept of "fâché" simply due to the memories and associations that I have with the two words, even though they're supposed to mean roughly the same thing.

If this account is right, then someone is probably going to be inconsistent in their moral judgments depending on what language they're speaking (in addition to all the other environmental factors that are influencing them at the time).

So, yes I think you're right that it is about culture, but I don't think that makes it less about language!

We’re Americans who moved to France 20 years ago. Our kids were 7 and 2 at the time and the 3rd was born here. The 2 younger ones (now 19 and 22) have literally a French persona and an American one. One can’t be bossy/whiny/mean IN ENGLISH- only in French. The language they speak (and to a lesser extent me and my husband) absolutely changes their personalities to be more culturally aligned with the language. I’ll say things to French people that I wouldn’t dare say to Americans (political debates are a great example), because I can and they can handle it. Generally, communication isn’t as sugar coated in France. This bothered my American family when we’d visit and I’d speak my mind about something. Learned that lesson pretty early on!

I imagine this is pretty common, I am more proper in English (my professional language) and more direct/curse more in my native language.

You'd be surprised. Most people would be more inclined to do something evil if asked by someone they trust, and you may have more trust in someone who speaks your language.

Language is a tool. The tools are different and shape the way that you see the world or solve problems. Of course a different language is going to change your viewpoints, values, and morality. Anyone who has done any sort of traveling can tell you this.

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I have about 300 days on duolingo. Hablo mucho Espanol, but trust me when I say I wouldn't be able to articulate my moral compass in Spanish yet, maybe a very streamlined and inaccurate version.

Agreed. The more you’re actively thinking about language production, the more I imagine you’d be engaging left-brain analytical processes often associated with utilitarian thinking.

Speaking in your native language, I imagine that right-brain, wholistic thinking would have more room to push people to a more deontological position.

As I became fluent in Australian, I became more sensitive to swear words until it became the same as in my native language.

However, this is quite handy, I can turn this sensitive of.

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Wery interesting

Its very interesting. Which is why many Latinos like myself reject the whitewashing of our language with things like x. It's human and beautiful as is. And strong.

Same with Spanish. But I prefer the emotion of Spanish. It's strong and beautiful at the same time.

I am Spanish/English speaker (live in English-speaking country with Spanish-speaking family. Speak Spanish daily). I swear, I am legit more socially conservative in Spanish.

I can't tell if it's the environment I grew up in or the language, or what, but it is much easier for me to understand conservative thought if I translate it to Spanish in my head.

On the other hand, I am much more economically progressive in Spanish too. It's like my English brain is a socially progressive quasi-libertarian sometimes, and my Spanish brain is a brocialist that doesn't like to consider social aspects.

My "actual" political beliefs are broadly progressive on both axes, but my instincts lean more one way or another and I have to fight my instincts and rely on principled convictions more in some aspects in one language and in other aspects in the other language.

I also speak some French (very little though) and in French, my brain seems to lean more removed, all principle, no intuitions. Probably because I haven't spent long enough in a French-speaking place to associate a political philosophy outlook with the language.

I find that I feel a lot more gender dysphoria in English than Spanish, and I wonder if it has to do with the role of gender in the language.

When tables are gendered female, it kind of takes the edge off. It feels arbitrary. Compare in English, every instance of people gendering me feels like they're deliberately making some sort of point.

By truly bilingual I think they meant from birth or a very young age, and not 300 days on Duolingo.

That.... That was my point....

It says a lot about how much of our day-to-day thinking is basically just our brain's autocomplete.

Yeah! And also how much of it is purely about what we think is normal. My default "normal" things in Spanish and English are different. And therefore what a "sanctity" or "this is unnatural" reaction looks like in both languages will change. The whole thing runs on availability bias.

A lot of moral philosophy I have read is super reliant on reverse-engineering moral ideas from a combo of moral intuition and phrasing. And yet almost none of it is linguistically comparative. I have never read a philosophy paper that discusses language differences at length that is not about philosophy of language.

There are a few papers I read recently that seemed kind of incoherent to me, where I think if the author was forced to translate their own work into another language, they would realize the narrowness of their perspective.

I've found myself mentally translating arguments in one language into my other to see if they still make sense.

I can't speak to morality and its progression, but the fact that individuals have so many differences informing/influencing their language choices is why in linguistics we don't quite go so far as to make any assumptions of why anyone says anything or what they intend to mean. All we have is what is actually said and how it is said, and we can look for patterns and points of interest from there.

A wonderful habit to have!

I'm wondering if you can do this on purpose. My French is very unemotional and theoretical, as I basically have to reverse-engineer sentences in it a lot of the time.

But if I read only Enlightenment works in French and never anything else, could I trick myself into making an "enlightenment thought" switch, like having a virtual machine inside another one?

I'm also learning Latin. If I read a lot of ancient Latin literature, will I get an "ancient Rome" switch inside my brain? Will it change my instincts in Latin vs French vs English vs Spanish? I know for a fact that I have found some books or short stories vastly more compelling in one language than the other (e.g. La Casa De Asterión is a masterpiece in Spanish. It's interesting and okay in English. Mistborn is a lot of fun in English. It is unbearable in Spanish).

I think the capacity to turn different moral intuitions on and off could prove astonishingly useful, and yet I rarely hear anyone discuss doing this on purpose.

This sounds awfully like Sapir Whorf

Hah! I'm the opposite! I hate how in French I have to pick gendered words to refer to myself. Meanwhile I can reach a true neutral when speaking in English and never gender myself... Language is great.

Now that you mention self-description, I have realised that I speak about myself very rarely in Spanish. I wonder if my weird phrasing and generally strange way of speaking has less to do with me being autistic and more to do with me subconsciously avoiding self-description.

I'm multilingual at native level and I have to say that my moral compass definitely stays the same.

I'm learning Spanish from English and part of this, I think, is that certain PC language-isms in English don't appear in Spanish. Things are said much more bluntly, without much care put into "offensive" vocabulary. As such, my English brain tells my Spanish brain it's being racist, even if it's not.

I can’t tell if it is correlation or causation, but as a multiple language speaker I have a seriously overactive empathy impulse and would consider myself highly moral. Empathy generally breeds morality, making the effort to understand other cultures makes you native culture feel less significant, which I think it is part of it. You also have to make yourself repeatedly vulnerable and rely on the kindness of strangers as you learn.

I thought this was going to be an article on a sort of moral equivalent to the fact that people who speak languages that don't have a different word for pink (for example)(they call it a light red) find it harder to differentiate between pink and red than we do. I think also Japanese(?) has a seperate word for light blue, and hence can differentiate between shades of blue better/easier.

Still interesting though.

In the article they say both native English speakers and native Spanish speakers had similar results in each other's language. Tbf though these are probably small studies, and culture might matter as well, and direct social environment you speak the language in, like French with your family and friends, English at work, and German with your SO's family.

This article starts out with a flaw with the careless usage of "morality" in the title and "ethical" in the subtitle. Perhaps this is just the fault of the author of the article rather than something from any actual study. But this switch of vocabulary relates to something that the article seems to reveal about at least one of the studies.

Morality is inherent and arises from or through the essence of one's being, which is very deep seated. Ethics, however, is a superficial construct that arises in the mind. The inspiration for, and the basis of ethics actually arise from inherent inner morality, but manifest through the ego-mind of personality which is acquired in life and evolves through life.

The the author asks "What defines who we are?" and speculates correctly that this definition must be at the core, the essential part of who one is, yet wrongly concludes that it must be one's moral center. The moral center, however, arises from who one really is, from one's essential being. Morals are not a mind game, they are representative of heart quality. However, as the Sufi teacher Hazrat Inayat Khan taught, "the mind is the surface of the heart and the heart is the depth of the mind," meaning that they are actually two aspects of the same thing.

The thoughts and feelings of the mind are primarily based upon what one learns in life through connections with things, other beings, and events, as well as reactions to and interactions with each of these aspects of life. People become identified with their developing ego-mind, and with their physical and emotional and intellectual self, and they live a life mostly out of touch with the inner essence of who and what they are, and thus out of touch with their heart's true wishes and desires, as well as remaining mostly ignorant of their true moral character. Yes, this gets into the spiritual aspect of who and what we are, which is sometimes stated as "we are spiritual beings having a material experience." But the standard scientific method is limited to studying only the mechanics of this material realm we live in and is forbidden from drifting off into the spiritual realm. So, as interested as psychologists might be in studying moral judgments, if they want to remain scientists, they will be prevented from studying the essence of morality.

Language is something we learn, along with the culture within which we live early on. This means that our native or primary language and culture are part of the more superficial aspects of who we are. All of this, though, is very deeply seated, very close to the heart, and much of it can be significantly influenced by the deep essence of being shared among one's fellow people. If one's initial development is bilingual and bi-cultural, then both languages and cultures would be of similar depth. Any other secondary language and cultural influences will, however, be learned somewhat later and therefore be less deeply seated, perhaps even quite shallow. This relative shallowness results in such later developments being further from the heart and more of the mind.

The deeper more heart-based aspects of one's life learning will be more fully embodied than later life learning will be. One will have deeper default modes of thinking, feeling and acting as well as of communicating, including language, as well as somewhat shallower modes that are more likely to be consciously chosen, if a situation allows for that, rather than defaulted to in one's general life. Because of this, the chosen modes, including language, will be less deep and more of a mind-based behavior than the deeply ingrained default modes that will be more holistic in nature.One difference that this hierarchical structure of learned behavior results in is that the closer one's learning and practice is to the heart, the more real it will feel and the more authentic it will manifest, whereas the closer one's learning and practice is to the mind, the more hypothetically it will manifest, because it will manifest more from the mind than from the heart. Whatever arises from the feeling heart will be based on one's morals, whereas ethics will determine what will manifest from the thinking mind. If one's ethics are very closely aligned with one's morals, there will be very little difference in what arises from either source. More likely, though, there will be significant differences between the two.

This most definitely comes into play in considering the moral dilemma known as the "trolley problem, which is entirely hypothetical, and therefore entirely a mind game to sort out rather than a real life situation one is facing. This does not encourage or even allow one to deeply consider at heart level how one would respond. If one were to actually become involved in such a situation, there would be no real time for thinking, because thinking takes too much time and one simply needs to act. Such actual action would come from within, automatically inspired and guided by one's deepest and most practiced values, meaning from closest to one's heart, which is entirely different from what is likely to come from one's mind if one has the luxury of time to think about what is happening. Likewise, reading descriptions and making choices is really no different, in that this is still entirely hypothetical and one has the luxury of time to think about what is involved, meaning this is limited to being a mind game rather than serving as a real life need to more automatically make a holistically derived choice according to whatever naturally arises based upon what is happening. Whether pondering the "trolley problem" or responding to descriptions of various scenario, the language (and corresponding culture) involved might have some influence only because one has the luxury of some time to think.

In automatically making such deep-level choices – quick, gut-level choices – a second language consideration is highly unlikely to come into play. No psychological test game, no hypothetical mind game, is meaningfully relevant to what a person would do in real life when faced with making real-time choices about taking action or about what sort of action to take. Any real life choice would primarily be made based on their deepest sense of their interconnectedness with other people in general, and also with the specific people actually involved. This choice would be made without involving much thinking in any ordinary language, it would be made from heart-based knowing and understanding, and it would be made very fast – much faster than a mind can think.

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This topic is interesting to me, since all people have a mother tongue and a learned or developing language,

as is usually the case with English or Spanish, which are the most widely spoken worldwide, among others,

which leads us to think: How to make relevant comments that are not offensive if something

is black or white for a given language? Thank you very much and blessings.