What defines who we are? Our habits? Our tastes? Our memories? I would say it must be my deep-seated sense of right and wrong.
And yet, like many other people who speak more than one language, I often have the sense that I’m a slightly different person in each of my languages — more confident in English, more relaxed in French. Is it possible that my moral compass also points in somewhat different directions depending on the language I’m using?
Several recent psychological studies suggest that when people are faced with moral dilemmas, they do respond differently when considering them in their native and foreign 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 is dashing toward a group of five people standing on the tracks, unable to move. You are next to a switch that can shift the trolley to a different set of tracks, thereby sparing 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 tend to be very reluctant (不情愿的) to say they would do this. But Costa and his colleagues found that posing the dilemma in a language that volunteers had learned as a foreign tongue dramatically increased their willingness, 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, gut-level “feeling,” and the other, careful deliberation about the greatest good for the greatest number. When we use a foreign language, we unconsciously sink into the more deliberate mode simply because the effort of operating in our non-native language cues our cognitive (认知) system to prepare for strenuous (费力的) activity. An alternative explanation is because our childhood languages change with greater emotional intensity than do those learned in more academic settings. As a result, moral judgments made in a foreign language are less burdened with the emotional reactions.
What then is a multilingual (多语言的) person’s true “moral self”? Is it my moral memories? Or is it the reasoning I’m able to apply when free of such unconscious restrictions? Or perhaps, as the research implies, regardless of how many languages we speak: that 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 author’s opinion, it is your_____that defines who you are.| A．habit |
| B．taste |
| C．memory |
| D．morality |
| A．most volunteers agree to pull the switch |
| B．most volunteers attempt to push a stranger off a footbridge |
| C．20% of the volunteers choose to shift the tracks of the trolley |
| D．50% of the volunteers are reluctant to kill the five people on the tracks |
| A．make decisions unconsciously in a foreign language |
| B．take more time to make decisions in a foreign language |
| C．learn a lot about academic settings in their native language |
| D．are more likely to be influenced by emotions in their native language |
| A．What is Our True Moral Self |
| B．How Languages Shape People’s Personality |
| C．What is the Key Factor in Decision Making |
| D．How Morality Changes in a Foreign Language |
