Title:
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Your morals depend on language
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Author:
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Costa, Albert, 1970-; Foucart, Alice; Hayakawa, Sayuri; Aparici Aznar, Melina; Apesteguia, Jose; Heafner, Joy; Keysar, Boaz
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Abstract:
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Should you sacrifice one man to save five? Whatever your answer, it should not depend on whether you were asked the/nquestion in your native language or a foreign tongue so long as you understood the problem. And yet here we report/nevidence that people using a foreign language make substantially more utilitarian decisions when faced with such moral/ndilemmas. We argue that this stems from the reduced emotional response elicited by the foreign language, consequently/nreducing the impact of intuitive emotional concerns. In general, we suggest that the increased psychological distance of/nusing a foreign language induces utilitarianism. This shows that moral judgments can be heavily affected by an orthogonal/nproperty to moral principles, and importantly, one that is relevant to hundreds of millions of individuals on a daily basis. |
Abstract:
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This research was partially supported by grants from the Spanish Government (PSI2011-23033, CONSOLIDER-INGENIO2010 CSD2007-00048, ECO2011-25295, and ECO2010-09555-E), from the Catalan Government (SGR 2009-1521), from the 7th Framework Programme (AThEME 613465), the University of Chicago’s Wisdom Research Project and the John Templeton Foundation, a National Science Foundation grant BCS-0849034, and *Language Learning*’s Small Grants Research Program. Alice Foucart was supported by a post-doctoral fellowship from the Catalan Government (Beatriu de Pinos). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. |
Rights:
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@2014 Costa et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits/nunrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
Document type:
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Article Article - Published version |
Published by:
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Public Library of Science
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