What defines us? If pressed, I would answer that if there is any part of me that sits at my core, then surely it must be my moral center, my deep-seated sense of right and wrong.
And I often feel that I’m a slightly different person in each language I speak — more determined in English, more relaxed in French, and more emotional in Czech. Is it possible that, along with these differences, my moral guidelines also point in somewhat different directions depending on the language I’m using?
In a research led by Albert Costa, volunteers were presented with a moral dilemma known as the “train problem”: Imagine that a train is charging at five people standing on the track, unable to move. The only way to stop the train and spare the five people is push another stranger off a footbridge into its path. Costa and his colleagues found that posing the dilemma in a language that volunteers had learned as foreign tongue dramatically increased their willingness to push the sacrificial person off the footbridge, from fewer than 20% respondents using their native language to about 50% of those using the foreign one.
In another research conducted by Janet Greipel, volunteers read acts that many people find immoral, such as stories where someone cooked and ate his dog after it had been Keadby car. Those who read the stories in a foreign language perceived these actions less wrong than those who read them in their native tongue.
The difference in this judgment comes down to two separate and competing thinking patterns — one of these, a quick and direct feeling, and the other, careful deliberation about the greatest good for the largest number. When we use a foreign language, we unconsciously sink into the more deliberate mode simply because the effort of operating in our no-native language activates our cognitive system. This is similar to findings that reading math problems in a hard-to-read typeface (字体) makes people less likely to make careless mistakes.
【小题1】What can we learn about the author from the first two paragraphs?| A．He invests time in studying language. | B．He perceives languages differ slightly. |
| C．He ignores the role of moral concepts. | D．He thinks languages relate to morals. |
| A．By carefully citing examples. | B．By collecting and listing data. |
| C．By conducting experiments. | D．By analyzing people’s habits. |
| A．To justify a thinking pattern. | B．To present a new finding. |
| C．To clarify the cognitive system. | D．To warn against making mistakes. |
| A．Morality. The Core of People | B．Languages: Insights into Judgments |
| C．Languages: A Shaping Power to Morality | D．Morality: A New Way to Learn Languages |
