Culture and Society
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An intriguing study involving the famous ethical dilemma known as the "trolley problem" suggests that our moral choices may be affected by language.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.The original problem – posed by philosopher Philippa Foot and later popularized in an article by philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson – asks what you would do when faced with a choice to save five people by killing one.
"Suppose you are the driver of a trolley. The trolley rounds a bend, and there come into view ahead five track workmen, who have been repairing the track. The track goes through a bit of a valley at that point, and the sides are steep, so you must stop the trolley if you are to avoid running the five men down. You step on the brakes, but alas they don't work. Now you suddenly see a spur of track leading off to the right," Thompson outlined in a paper.
"You can turn the trolley onto it, and thus save the five men on the straight track ahead. Unfortunately, Mrs. Foot has arranged that there is one track workman on that spur of track. He can no more get off the track in time than the five can, so you will kill him if you turn the trolley onto him. Is it morally permissible for you to turn the trolley? Everybody to whom I have put this hypothetical case says, yes, it is."
When asked in the abstract, i.e., when a train isn't actually barreling towards five oblivious workers, the majority of people will say it is morally permissible to pull the lever and kill one person to save five. Toddlers, meanwhile, may choose to add one more person to the pile of five and let the train do its thing.
We would like to think that our moral choices are the result of deeply-held principles, or a rational and consistent assessment of the dilemma and the potential outcomes. If this were the case, your choice in the trolley problem should not be affected too much by how the question is posed. But testing that out in a 2014 study, one team of researchers found that the language that the question was posed in was detrimental to the choice made by people standing at the (imaginary) lever.
In that study, the team first used a modified version of the trolley problem. In this version, you are standing on a bridge and watching a train hurtling towards five people on the tracks below, but you can save them by pushing a large man off the bridge, using his body as external brakes.
Generally, people are less likely to say they would push the man onto the tracks, even though the outcome (a dead human) is the same whether you're pushing a button or a surprised individual. The team recruited participants who spoke more than one language, including Korean, English, Spanish, French, and Hebrew, and posed the modified trolley problem to the volunteers either in their native language or their second language.
"Across all populations more participants selected the utilitarian choice, to save five by killing one, when using the foreign language than their native tongue," the team explains in their study, adding that on average, the chance of participants killing one person to save five was increased by more than half, if the question was posed in the participant's non-native tongue.
Overall, when speaking in their native language, only 18 percent of participants chose to push, but when it was posed in their second language, this went up to a whopping 44 percent. There were some differences, depending on which language the participants spoke. All Korean speakers, for stark example, chose not to push the man when the question was posed in their own language, which the team put down to a potential "cultural prohibition". However, when it was posed in their non-native language, there was an increase in their willingness to kill to save lives of around 7.5 percent.
"The results support the hypothesis that the reduced emotional resonance of a foreign language leads individuals to be less affected by an emotional aversion to pushing the man, allowing them to make more utilitarian decisions," they add.
Though interesting, the team was concerned that the problem could be that participants reading the task didn't understand it properly, and that randomly selected answers could push up the "kill the man" choice significantly. To evaluate this, they reverted to the original trolley problem, in which participants must only throw a lever or push a button, rather than hurl a large man off a bridge.
"If reduced emotional reactions determine our effect, we should not find an effect of language in the less emotional switch dilemma," the team explains. "If it is random responding, we should find a reversed effect, as random response should push utilitarian choice down towards 50%."
As well as this, in the second test, the participants were asked to rate how well they understood the question, with people rating it below 50 percent excluded from the results. Sure enough, the problem was not found to be participants selecting random choices.
"These results replicate the results of Experiment 1 and show an even larger difference, from a 13 percentage-point increase in utilitarian choices in Experiment 1, to 26 percentage points in Experiment 2," the team explains.
Overall, the team concludes that moral choices may depend on how native the language was to the participants.
"Most likely, a foreign language reduces emotional reactivity, promoting cost-benefit considerations, leading to an increase in utilitarian judgments," the team explains.
"The reduction of the emotionality elicited by a foreign language may promote psychological distance in general. Increasing psychological distance leads individuals to construe situations in more abstract terms, which in some circumstances aligns with more utilitarian decision making."
Another potential effect discussed by the researchers is that the participants reading the task in a second language may have been slowed down by it.
"Studies have shown that disrupting cognitive fluency or slowing down decisions decreases decision biases by moving individuals to a more careful and deliberative mode of processing," they write. "Given that using a foreign language could reduce cognitive fluency, it might diminish the impact of intuitive processes on moral judgment."
Supporting this idea, the team found that the more familiar the participants were with the second language, the more likely their decision was to be in line with native speakers using their own language. It may be a mix of these factors, but what is clear is that our moral values, fixed as they may seem, can be heavily influenced by other factors, including the language a dilemma is posed in.
