My anecdotal experience says just having the ability to verbalize in different languages(3 in my case) makes you reason for a longer time. I suspect, that helps avoid some sort of biases, but might be a crippling factor in some situations(time-constrained decisions) .
Thinking in a Foreign Tongue Reduces Decision Biases
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Re: Thinking in a Foreign Tongue Reduces Decision Biases
#12Kipling noticed this - in his book Kim (Indian) is thinking in English to overcome hypnosis :)
Re: Thinking in a Foreign Tongue Reduces Decision Biases
#13My anecdotal experience says just having the ability to verbalize in different languages(3 in my case) makes you reason for a longer time. I suspect, that helps avoid some sort of biases, but might be a crippling factor in some situations(time-constrained decisions) .
In this case the experiment compared bilinguals who had the problem presented to them in their native tongue with bilinguals who had the problem presented to them in their second language. It found that answers were dependant on the language they had been presented in - when the answers were in a foreign language there was less decision bias. It seems that being bilingual did not prevent people from having this bias in their native tongue.
Re: Thinking in a Foreign Tongue Reduces Decision Biases
#14this is absolutely true. having become fluent in french as a second language, i find that i seem to make decisions much more rapidly and with less consternation than in English. when i first noticed this, like the authors of the paper, i concluded that it did have a fair amount to do with being emotionally distanced from what i was saying, so awesome to see it formalized!
Re: Thinking in a Foreign Tongue Reduces Decision Biases
#15Sounds reasonable. My experience (native polish, almost native english plus ukraininan and russian) says brain is rather unable (or it's not used) to use multiple languages at the same time. So if you think in foreign language (I mean: language you don't usualy think in) brain hasn't enough words (or is too lazy to look for them ;)) to make big analysis of problem so It doesn't do that.
Re: Thinking in a Foreign Tongue Reduces Decision Biases
#16My anecdotal experience says just having the ability to verbalize in different languages(3 in my case) makes you reason for a longer time. I suspect, that helps avoid some sort of biases, but might be a crippling factor in some situations(time-constrained decisions) .
In this case the experiment compared bilinguals who had the problem presented to them in their native tongue with bilinguals who had the problem presented to them in their second language. It found that answers were dependant on the language they had been presented in - when the answers were in a foreign language there was less decision bias. It seems that being bilingual did not prevent people from having this bias…
Yep, read the paper. But am very uncomfortable calling this a decision bias. It's more specific than that. It's about aversion of risk and how framing a decision in loss terms vs gain terms leads people to decide differently(see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring). Otherwise i agree the bilingual subjects do display the bias in their native tongue. Am gonna try reasoning in all three languages i know and see how that affects my decision making :-P