Imagine that a Polish politician is going to a NATO summit, where a decision is to be made to impose far-reaching political sanctions on one of the Asian countries, which may consequently lead to the outbreak of war in this region. The politician, who is to represent Poland and decide on its behalf whether to join or not to impose sanctions, speaks English at a good level and therefore waives the help of an interpreter during the summit. Would you trust him to make the most carefully considered decision possible?
Millions of people communicate in more than one language every day, using it at work, study and social relationships. It was checked whether and how the use of a foreign language affects the assessment of the situation and decision-making. When we think in another language, do we think the same way as we do in our native language? Would we make the same decisions? Does using a language other than your native language change the way we communicate?
What is decision making?
Thinking is a complex cognitive process involving analysis, association and inference. It might seem, therefore, that regardless of whether this process takes place in our native or foreign language, it happens naturally, unconsciously and in the same way. Making a decision based on the same data, beliefs, knowledge and reasoning should have the same ending regardless of whether we use our native or foreign language for the process. However, scientists have found that this is not necessarily the case.
The experiments show that when we have options presented in a foreign language, people are more willing to make less risky choices. This happens because a foreign language provides greater cognitive and emotional distance than the native language, so when making decisions in a foreign language, we become less emotional and more analytical.
Thinking and reasoning involve the use of two types of processes. The first type relies mainly on mental resources and is more analytical, conscious, and systematic, while the second type is intuitive, affective, and heuristic (Kahneman, 2003; Sloman, 1996; Stanovich & West, 2000). On the one hand, there are good reasons to believe that a foreign language, being more difficult to use, may increase cognitive load and lead to greater reliance on intuitive and affective processes, and so the resulting decision would be less informed.
On the other hand, it can be assumed that a foreign language may have the opposite effect, making people rely more on systematic processes, thus reducing the tendency to make hasty decisions or decisions based on emotions or hunches.
How do we make decisions?
Decision-making is a procedural and technological feature of the management process with multiple economic and psycho-sociological determinants. Decision-making can be considered in two senses (J. Targalski 1986).
In a broad sense, it is complex process, which includes: registration and evaluation of information, identification decision-making problem and application of the adopted selection criterion, defining and issuing a decision (decision-making task) and recording information about its implementation.
In the second - narrow sense - decision-making is only one of the stages of the decision-making process and means a conscious act of will of a person making a non-random choice of one from a set of possible variants solving a decision-making problem.
The simplest form of decision-making consists of three stages:
– stage one – problem identification, i.e. determining the causes, effects and probable solutions,
– stage two - decision design, i.e. developing variants of the optimal solution,
– stage three - selection of the final decision, i.e. the selection of the best variant consistent with previously established criteria (E. Kowalczyk, G. Roszyk-Kowalska 2016).
A language that is foreign or close to us?
A foreign language can provide greater distance because it is less rooted in emotion than the native language. Even when people fully understand the meaning of words, they respond less emotionally to them in a foreign language. This reduction in emotional response may reduce the influence of affective processes and allow people to rely more on analytical processes when making decisions.
A more cognitive source of distance may be the fact that a foreign language is usually processed less automatically than the native language (Favreau & Segalowitz, 1983).
Why does using a foreign language influence our decision-making?
This impact may be determined by many factors that increase psychological distance and encourage longer reflection. Perhaps the most important mechanism of our action is the reduction of emotional dissonance associated with the use of a foreign language. Emotions and affects play an important role in decision-making and risk considerations. An emotional reaction sometimes causes a desire to reduce the tension associated with having to make a choice, and often this tension is so great that, in trying to reduce it, a person is ready to make a less well-thought-out decision.
Can this knowledge have any significance in everyday life?
Taking into account the fact that more and more people use a foreign language on a daily basis, both in the private and professional sphere, and the world is becoming an increasingly global village, discovering the essence of the issue may have a large impact, for example, on how we perceive people employed in positions requiring high analytical qualifications, such as long-term investments, pension funds, enterprise management, and finally - political decision-making.
Literature
- Ayciceği, A., & Harris, C. L. (2004). Bilinguals' recall and recognition of emotion words. Cognition & Emotion, 18, 977–987.
- Favreau, M., & Segalowitz, N. (1983). Automatic and controlled processes in the first- and second-language reading of fluent bilinguals. Memory & Cognition, 11, 565–574
- Harris, C. L., Aycicegi, A., & Gleason, J. B. (2003). Taboo words and reprimands induce greater autonomic reactivity in a first than in a second language. Applied Psycholinguistics, 24, 561–578.
- Kahneman, D. (2003). A perspective on judgment and choice: Mapping bounded rationality. American Psychologist, 58, 697–720.
- Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica, 47, 263–291.
- Kowalczyk E., Roszyk-Kowalska G., (2016), Man in the organization of the 21st century. Challenges for contemporary management, Student Scientific Club of Business Psychology, Poznań
- Puntoni, S., de Langhe, B., & van Osselaer, S. (2009). Bilingualism and the emotional intensity of advertising language. Journal of Consumer Research, 35, 1012–1025
- Sloman, S. A. (1996). The empirical case for two systems of reasoning. Psychological Bulletin, 119, 3–22
- Stanovich, K. E., & West, R. F. (2000). Individual differences in reasoning: Implications for the rationality debate? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23, 645–665
- Targalski J., (1986), Decision-making, In: Organization and management, edited by A. Stabryła, J. Trzcieniecki, Warsaw