The Foreign-Language Effect

TLDR

Decision‑making is often assumed to be language‑independent, yet the use of a foreign language may alter systematic choices. The study investigates whether using a foreign language reduces decision‑making biases. The authors attribute the bias reduction to the increased cognitive and emotional distance afforded by a foreign language. Across four experiments, framing effects, risk aversion for gains, risk seeking for losses, and loss aversion were all attenuated in a foreign language, leading to higher acceptance of positive‑expected‑value bets.

Abstract

Would you make the same decisions in a foreign language as you would in your native tongue? It may be intuitive that people would make the same choices regardless of the language they are using, or that the difficulty of using a foreign language would make decisions less systematic. We discovered, however, that the opposite is true: Using a foreign language reduces decision-making biases. Four experiments show that the framing effect disappears when choices are presented in a foreign tongue. Whereas people were risk averse for gains and risk seeking for losses when choices were presented in their native tongue, they were not influenced by this framing manipulation in a foreign language. Two additional experiments show that using a foreign language reduces loss aversion, increasing the acceptance of both hypothetical and real bets with positive expected value. We propose that these effects arise because a foreign language provides greater cognitive and emotional distance than a native tongue does.