Thinking in a Foreign Tongue Reduces Decision Biases | Hacker News Reader

Thinking in a Foreign Tongue Reduces Decision Biases

pss.sagepub.com

72 pointssakai13 comments

Finally found a link to the full text PDF: http://portal.unitbv.ro/proxy/download.ashx?dec=1&url=uh...!

I wonder what percentage of the students had studied game theory and realised that the expected outcome of either medicine was the same...

Speaking English and french as foreign languages (germen being the mother language), I can largely agree with the OP, from my experience. While it's hard to explain why it is like that, for me it takes out some cultural biases you most of the time have when you think in your own language (profiency in said foreign language required).

If someone has a native-level of fluency in more than one language, would the decision-making bias remain?

Good question, possibel that it goes the way as with dreams. Have to ask my girl-friend about it...

Living abroad, half the time I find myself thinking in another language. I recently decided which foreign language I should spend my time on next. Turns out my teacher doesn't speak English so I'll be learning my fourth and final language via my third language. Confused? I am, though I suppose I'm making a sound decision...

I learned some Spanish in English, which is not my native language. I've found the key is to think in whatever language you are using most as much as you can; at least in the beginning.

My anecdotal experience says just having the ability to verbalize in different languages(3 in my case) makes you reason for a longer time. I suspect, that helps avoid some sort of biases, but might be a crippling factor in some situations(time-constrained decisions) .

In this case the experiment compared bilinguals who had the problem presented to them in their native tongue with bilinguals who had the problem presented to them in their second language. It found that answers were dependant on the language they had been presented in - when the answers were in a foreign language there was less decision bias. It seems that being bilingual did not prevent people from having this bias in their native tongue.

Yep, read the paper. But am very uncomfortable calling this a decision bias. It's more specific than that. It's about aversion of risk and how framing a decision in loss terms vs gain terms leads people to decide differently(see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring). Otherwise i agree the bilingual subjects do display the bias in their native tongue. Am gonna try reasoning in all three languages i know and see how that affects my decision making :-P

Sounds reasonable. My experience (native polish, almost native english plus ukraininan and russian) says brain is rather unable (or it's not used) to use multiple languages at the same time. So if you think in foreign language (I mean: language you don't usualy think in) brain hasn't enough words (or is too lazy to look for them ;)) to make big analysis of problem so It doesn't do that.

this is absolutely true. having become fluent in french as a second language, i find that i seem to make decisions much more rapidly and with less consternation than in English. when i first noticed this, like the authors of the paper, i concluded that it did have a fair amount to do with being emotionally distanced from what i was saying, so awesome to see it formalized!

Kipling noticed this - in his book Kim (Indian) is thinking in English to overcome hypnosis :)

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