Psychologists who study moral judgments have found that when people are faced with moral dilemmas, they tend to respond differently when considering them in a foreign language than when using their native tongue.
In a 2014 paper led by Albert Costa, volunteers were presented with a moral dilemma known as the “trolley problem”: imagine that a runaway trolley bus is rushing toward a group of five people standing on the tracks, unable to move. You are next to a switch that can change the trolley to a different set of tracks, therefore saving the five people, but resulting in the death of one who is standing on the side tracks. Do you pull the switch?
Most people agree that they would. But what if the only way to stop the trolley is by pushing a large stranger off a footbridge into its path? People hesitate to say they would do this, even though in both situations, one person is sacrificed to save five. But Costa and his colleagues found that setting the dilemma in a language that volunteers had learned as a foreign tongue dramatically increased their stated willingness to push the sacrificial person off the footbridge, from fewer than 20% of respondents working in their native language to about 50% of those using the foreign one.
Why does it matter whether we judge morality in our native language or a foreign one? According to one explanation, such judgments involve two separate and competing modes of thinking: one of these, a quick “feeling” and the other, careful consideration about the greatest good for the greatest number. When we use a foreign language, we unconsciously sink into the more careful mode simply because the effort of operating in our non-native language reminds our brain to prepare for painstaking activity.
An alternative explanation is that differences arise between native and foreign tongues because our childhood languages are associated with greater emotion than those learned in more academic environment. As a result, moral judgments made in a foreign language are less filled with the emotional reactions that appear when we use a language learned in childhood.
What is a multilingual(多语言的) person’s “true” moral self? Is it my moral memories that taught me what it means to be “good”? Or is it the reasoning I’m able to apply when free of such unconscious restrictions? Or perhaps, this research simply indicates what is true for all of us: regardless of how many languages we speak, our moral compass is a combination of the earliest forces that have shaped us and the ways in which we escape them.
【小题1】In the famous “trolley problem” experiment volunteers are asked to.| A．change the trolley to a different set of tracks |
| B．push a large stranger off a footbridge |
| C．sacrifice one person’s life to save another five people |
| D．get involved in making a moral judgment |
| A．Emotional feelings. |
| B．Careful consideration. |
| C．Academic environment. |
| D．The mode of thinking. |
| A．Moral memories. | B．Reasoning. |
| C．Unconscious restrictions. | D．A combination of more than one factor. |
| A．Native Spanish speakers with English as their foreign language are sure to push that person off the footbridge. |
| B．An Italian student may find the story of a morally bad person less wrong when it is told in English. |
| C．Faced with the same maths problem, one must make more mistakes in a foreign language than in his native one. |
| D．Representatives at the UN are supposed to base their decisions more on emotion than on reasoning. |
