Moral Judgments Depend on What Language We’re Speaking
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
First: did they even find some kind of correlation, or is it just a statistical aberration? Second: if they found a real correlation, is their explanation of why that correlation exists correct?
IMHO, their evidence does not support their claims. Where are the controls? What are the sampling biases? What are possible alternative explanations, and why are those not considered? What is the relationship between a person's response to a hypothetical situation and his/her actions in a real one?
They greatly overstate their findings in the discussion section. It's almost painful to read:
> We have shown that people’s moral judgments and decisions depend on the native-ness of the language in which a dilemma is presented, becoming more utilitarian in a foreign language.
> Most likely, a foreign language reduces emotional reactivity, promoting cost-benefit considerations, leading to an increase in utilitarian judgments.
> This discovery has important consequences for our globalized world as many individuals make moral judgments in both native and foreign languages. Immigrants face personal moral dilemmas in a foreign language on a daily basis, sometimes dilemmas with even larger stakes such as when serving as a jury member in a trial.
> Given that what we have discovered is surprising and unintuitive, increasing awareness of the impact of using a foreign language may help us check our decision-making context and make choices that are based on the things that should really matter.
> Foreign languages are used in international, multilingual forums such as the United Nations, the European Union, large investment firms and international corporations in general. Moral choices within these domains can be explained better, and are made more predictable by our discovery.
Wait, what? When was that covered in the rest of the paper?
The problem is the people in group one are not the same as those in group two. Statistical controls can mitigate the risk of randomness crashing the party. But there is an experimental solution: have the same people evaluate similar situations in a foreign and their native tongues. That said, something gained if it inspires a more rigorous study.
Also does not work. You'll prime the test subject, and bias them.
Very true, good point. It's quite common to see a study that makes some observations, even rigorously controlled ones (this isn't an example), then offers a conclusion that isn't supported by the observations. People untrained in science notice the quality of the observations and think that supports the conclusion.
In this case, a correlation is established, then, when evidence for a cause-effect relationship is needed, the authors instead begin waving their arms.
In the book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" there are a number of experiments described that show that human thought can roughly be separated into two systems, one of which is intuitive, fast, heuristic, and low-energy, and the other which is rational, analytical, uses more calories, and is only engaged when necessary.
We use the first system most of the time, and only use the second system when we really need to. They found that when people were given something to read in a smaller font, their responses to it were more rational.
This might be the same effect - if the second system is already engaged due to the difficulty of understanding the other language, the result is a more rational response.
It's a very interesting book, and well done. It's a bit long, but thorough. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow
When you study a language in a classroom, you frequently engage in conversations on various topics, whose sole purpose is to make you practice much more than to actually have a well-thought conversation. As such (and here I speak from my own experience only), it is much more common to defend positions in which you don't actually believe, for the sake of argument or maybe just because it is easier to express than the subtleties you might find while thinking this over in your native language.
I think it may be a good idea to try to only ask bilingual people (as opposed to people studying a language), or at least to test the above hypothesis before jumping to conclusions.
Being able to communicate in two languages is not the same as being bilingual. The study in question suggests that thinking/communicating in a language that one is less than fluent in leads to more utilitarian decisions.
The important thing here is fluency, not nativeness. I am fluent in German but I started learning it at 12. German is not a native language for me but I am fluent in it. As such the study suggests I should be equally utilitarian in it and English, my mother tongue. But my French and Mandarin are both quite bad so I should be more utilitarian in them because I must be more deliberate.
However, I don't understand the downvote?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
I spent more time than I should reading about several possible answers :)
for example:
http://philosophyfaculty.ucsd.edu/faculty/rarneson/Courses/t...
some with a libertarian slant:
http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2012/08/the-trolley-non...
http://freedomed.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-trolley-problem-is...
Edit: where is a good place to read about and/or discuss interesting philosophical questions (preferrably not too far out :) )? Is it worth it to take a course on philosophy? (I've had short courses on "moral education" which were really awful).
In the surgeon's example there is also cost of killing (surgeon as well as patient may feel bad about it or some other values in moral system of a person might be compromised like honor or keeping an oath) but it's again only matter of weighting the arguments not action vs inaction. It's easy to realize once you up the scale a bit: make it a scenario with whole town dying instead of young healthy person and you will get a consensus. From that you can see that action vs inaction isn't really what the problem is about.
You should explore similar books to these:
- The Pig That Wants to be Eaten
- The Duck That Won the Lottery
Edit: I've also had a recommendation of watching Michael Sandel's videos:
"A man who worked the gears for a train line took his son to work. His son ran off to play and when it came time for him to divert a train (not doing so would cause a head on collision) he couldn't see his son, but he heard him cry out - he was stuck in the gears. Diverting the train would kill his son. So he does the right thing, sacrifices his son to save hundreds of lives."
This was a Sunday School story, meant to illustrate how God So Loved The World that he sacrificed his son. So I've actually always unhesitatingly believed that the needs of the many out weigh the needs of the few, or the one.
As an adult and upon deeper reflection, I find that this holds true for strangers, but if I am completely honest my life and the lives of those I hold dear are worth more to me than the lives of basically any number of strangers.
It involves the rights and obligations of a parent, for one.
I also agree I might have chosen differently if it were my son.
I much prefer a world where you are sad and your son is dead, to a world where hundreds of people are dead, all their families are sad, and your son is alive.
(That said, it's at least somewhat plausible that if I was in that situation, I would also make the wrong decision. That doesn't make it right.)
I mean, a man goes to work which involves speeding trains, and he lets his son play in the railroad? Out of sight? Assuming he's such an idiot, where's his manager and why does the manager even allow that thing? Does the manager even know it? How many safety regulations should be violated for this to happen?
And a speeding train is on a collision course with another unless one single guy moves the gear in time (with a few seconds of safety margin)? Think about it. What happens if the guy has to go to pee, or (more realistically) he had a heart attack?
It's doubly fucked up when used as a Christian parable, because, you know, isn't the whole point of God that he's omniscient. (And he designed and built the whole railroad system with zero safety margin... God knows why.)
As a non-native English speaker, I wonder if this affects programming. Do English-speaking people find beautiful programs written in English more beautiful than others ? Anyone here programmed in both their mother tongue and one other language ?
From the developers I know (and that is still my case to some extent) people refer to the keywords as their function rather than their meaning. So when you see a 'while' or a 'for' loop, you just interpret it as a loop regardless of the original meaning of the word, it's not English anymore, it's just code blocks.
But I'm wondering how it's interpreted from the point of view of a native speaker.
As for function/variable/type/etc names and comments -- in Russia english is the standard. Russian is rarely used in comments, and using russian in code is frowned upon, so it (almost) never happens.
> But I'm wondering how it's interpreted from the point of view of a native speaker.
In Russia, we have company called 1C. One of the software products of this company is "1C: Enterprise". This product has some built-in language(for automatizing common accountant tasks or something like that). And keywords in this language are russian words.
I've never programmed in this language. And code in it looks really horrible to me, to the point of being repulsive. Here is hello world program, in case anyone is interested:
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Встроенный_язык_программирован...
Microsoft Excel uses different function names in different languages. It is hell. I learned what the function is used to be named in English and it is hard to guess what translated version would be.
This question doesn't seem scientific.
I would say, "We didn't predict this outcome, what's wrong with our theory?"
If you're observing something in nature, in this case people, calling nature inconsistent doesn't make sense. Nature is consistent. Your theory has problems if it calls nature inconsistent.
Maybe this "results" are nothing to do with moral judgment?
I am a native french speaker and live in the U.S. "Moral" decisions feel the same for me at least. I will be more influenced by the culture around me than a choice of words...
1: http://blogs.worldbank.org/impactevaluations/fruit-salad-cho...
I mean seriously, if you're going to test the slight difference in people's moral attitudes based on the method of information consumption at least find it important to consistently distinguish between oral and written.
That aside, this article, unless you ignore what was actually tested and just imagine it to be what you want, is saying absolutely nothing.
The paper is at http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna... , and unfortunately has the provocative title "Your Morals Depend on Language", instead of a more accurate title like "There's a possibility that some people's morals are correlated with language, but we're not sure and we're also not sure if that's true for everybody because our sampling is insufficient to allow us to draw such a conclusion".
Predict, yes. Explain, no. Many such studies can predict that something is going to happen, that a correlation exists, but far fewer even attempt to offer a testable explanation, a way to turn a correlation into a cause-effect relationship. Science commentators as far back as Aristotle have described science as a way to craft explanations for observations, not merely describe the observations and their outcomes, which is that this study does.