Your Morals Depend on Language

Your Morals Depend on Language

Should you sacrifice one man to save five? Whatever your answer, it should not depend on whether you were asked the question in your native language or a foreign tongue so long as you understood the problem. And yet here we report evidence that people using a foreign language make substantially more utilitarian decisions when faced with such moral dilemmas. We argue that this stems from the red...

Your Morals Might Be Your Moods∗

We test the effect of players’ moods on their behavior in a gift-exchange game. In the first stage of the game, player 1 chooses a transfer to player 2. In the second stage, player 2 chooses an effort level. Higher effort is more costly for player 2, but it increases player 1’s payoff. We say that player 2 reciprocates if effort is increasing in the transfer received. Player 2 is generous if ef...

Law, Language and Morals

Our morals really depends on our language: The foreign language effect within participants

Recent research has suggested that using a foreign language to present hypothetical moral dilemmas increases the rate of utilitarian judgments about those dilemmas (e.g., Greene et al, 2001) and decreases incoherency between judgments in framing effect tasks (e.g., Tversky & Kahneman, 1981; see Costa, Foucart, Arnon, Aparici, & Apesteguia, 2014; Costa, Foucart, Hayakawa, Aparici, Apesteguia, He...

Your theory of language evolution depends on your theory of language

This paper is more about the questions for a theory of language evolution than about the answers. I’d like to ask what there is for a theory of the evolution of language to explain, and I want to show how this depends on what you think language is. So, what is language? Everybody recognizes that language is partly culturally dependent: there is a huge variety of disparate languages in the world...