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If you asked a multilingual friend which language they find more emotional, the answer would usually be their mother tongue—the one they used while growing up and probably still use at home. This does not mean they are incapable of expressing emotion in another language, but there is a clear link between first languages and stronger emotional expression.

This has a lot to do with where and how we learn a language. Our first language, which linguists call L1, is usually acquired in the emotionally charged settings of childhood and family. Second languages, known as L2, are often learned in more neutral contexts, such as schools and institutions, making them less emotionally intense.

Research has shown that this difference in emotional intensity may also impact our moral decision-making—bilinguals tend to make different decisions depending on which language they use.

In their L1, they make more deontological decisions (meaning they comply with a certain set of ethical rules or duties). In L2, however, their choices are often more rational, and aim to maximize well-being for the greatest number of people.

This phenomenon is known as the moral foreign language effect. Our team has conducted a series of studies into this phenomenon, in order to better understand the relationship between the fundamental human experiences of language, emotion, and moral judgments.

Language influences moral decisions

In , we gathered data from 204 Spanish speakers who started learning English after the age of three in instructional settings, such as schools or private language centers. We asked them to solve a moral dilemma, justify their decision, and describe the emotions they experienced.

They were presented with the , where people must decide whether they would push an innocent man off a footbridge, thereby killing him, in order to stop a train that is about to kill five people who are tied to the tracks. Half of the participants read and replied in Spanish and the other half did so in English.

Our participants not only made more emotional decisions in their L1, but also used more emotional words to justify these decisions, providing arguments such as "I can't kill a person" or "it's a homicide, it would make me a murderer." They also appeared to be more concerned about breaking the law, and felt guiltier when speaking in their L1.

By contrast, the use of the L2 was associated with more rational arguments such as "I don't want to become a passive murderer" or "allowing mass death to occur is impermissible." These arguments included a substantially lower number of emotional words than those in the L1.

Second language vs. lingua franca

, we asked 141 Spanish-English bilinguals and 123 Cypriot Greek-English bilinguals to answer two emotionally charged dilemmas, similar to the footbridge dilemma. Interestingly, language only appeared to affect the moral judgments made by the Spanish-English group—our Cypriot Greek-English participants provided quite similar responses in their L1 and L2.

This is likely because English, although not an official language in Cyprus, serves as the country's lingua franca, and is used in many sectors such as education and tourism. This suggests that intense daily exposure to the L2 also has an impact on the way we make moral decisions.

Different types of moral dilemmas

In a , we recruited another 160 Spanish-English bilinguals, but this time, we asked them to respond to two dilemmas which were based on real life.

In the first, they had to decide whether they would tell their partner that they had cheated on them during a business trip (the cheater's dilemma). In the second, they had to decide whether they would tell the police that their best friend had committed a crime (the friend's choice dilemma).

The was only observed in the friend's choice dilemma, likely because it involves breaking the law. In the cheater's dilemma, there were no differences between L1 and L2 moral decisions.

We pursued this further in , where we recruited 62 English-Spanish bilinguals and presented them with the cheater's dilemma. We confirmed that their decisions did not seem to depend on which language they used.

We believe this is because both telling the truth and lying to the partner are emotionally charged decisions—the former emotionally harms the participant's partner, while the latter places a burden on their conscience.

Nevertheless, we did observe some differences in the emotions that our participants experienced. In L1 they expressed more fear, followed by depression and disappointment. In L2 we observed more depression, followed by guilt and pain.

Guilt and morality

Guilt has been a recurrent emotion in our studies. Guilt can be used as a coercive mechanism, and those who experience it are more likely to make choices based on a sense of duty and rules. Therefore, we decided to conduct .

In this study, 52 Greek-Spanish bilinguals read two dilemmas based on real life, which served to induce a feeling of guilt. They were then asked to remember and describe a past event that made them feel guilty. They conducted these tasks in their L2. A month later, they repeated the same tasks in their L1.

Our participants experienced the emotion of guilt more strongly in their L1, and used a richer and more diverse emotional vocabulary to describe their experiences of guilt in L1.

However, they were more keen to talk about taboo topics—such as infidelity, homosexuality or death—in their L2. This could be because the L2 creates a degree of emotional detachment and allows people to express themselves in a more direct way.

Emotional language influences decisions

Emotional vocabulary can also affect people's choices. Consider these two wordings of the footbridge dilemma: "Would you kill the man?" and "Would you push the man off the bridge?" They are asking the same thing, but they can provoke very different responses.

found that moral questions with emotionally charged verbs (such as "kill") lead to more deontological reactions than moral questions with neutral verbs (such as "push"). However, this only occurred in the L1.

These wording effects have various implications for other areas where emotional vocabulary is used, such as advertising and marketing.

A complex picture

Our studies have explored and confirmed the moral foreign language effect. However, they also show that the picture is extremely complex—language is important, but our moral judgments and emotions depend on far more than which language we speak in.

Factors such as intense exposure to the L2, the type of dilemma presented, and even its specific wording can all influence moral decision-making. Individual factors, such as can also make a difference, especially when it comes to notions of justice.

The social implications are profound, particularly in today's multilingual societies, where more and more people have to make daily decisions in languages that they have acquired later in life. It can affect a vast range of people, from immigrants using a second language to navigate bureaucracy, to international businesses that adopt a common working language to facilitate communication among employees. In legal settings, fairness and equality for non-native speakers are also major issues.

Recognizing the role that language can play in these contexts—where moral decision-making will unavoidably take place—is of the utmost importance for citizens, scientists, and policy makers.

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