If you want to play with the trolley problem: http://www.pippinbarr.com/games/trolleyproblem/TrolleyProble...
Moral Judgments Depend on What Language We’re Speaking
21–30 of 50 posts
Re: Moral Judgments Depend on What Language We’re Speaking
#22When I first heard this problem, it was told in a heart-wrenching first-person 'this actually happened' way. Roughly as follows: "A man who worked the gears for a train line took his son to work. His son ran off to play and when it came time for him to divert a train (not doing so would cause a head on collision) he couldn't see his son, but he heard him cry out - he was stuck in the gears. Diverting the train would…
As a parent, not only would I not hit the switch, I'd blame Congress for the passenger deaths for not funding modernization of the switching infrastructure.
Re: Moral Judgments Depend on What Language We’re Speaking
#23I wonder if this might not be something else. When you study a language in a classroom, you frequently engage in conversations on various topics, whose sole purpose is to make you practice much more than to actually have a well-thought conversation. As such (and here I speak from my own experience only), it is much more common to defend positions in which you don't actually believe, for the sake of argument or maybe…
Neither of the two languages a bilingual person speaks is considered foreign. Otherwise the person would not be bilingual. What would be the result of such a study? Keep in mind that in linguistics the difference between being a native speaker and having learned a language after the critical period is considered huge.
Right. Presumably for a bilingual person (where both languages are native), both languages they speak would have equal emotional impact.
Re: Moral Judgments Depend on What Language We’re Speaking
#24If you want to play with the trolley problem: http://www.pippinbarr.com/games/trolleyproblem/TrolleyProble...
It doesn't work for me in neither Firefox nor Chrome. The space doesn't work on level 0 and 1 (training and 3 people vs 1) but it does work with fat person.
Re: Moral Judgments Depend on What Language We’re Speaking
#25> Extreme moral dilemmas are supposed to touch the very core of our moral being. So why the inconsistency? This question doesn't seem scientific. I would say, "We didn't predict this outcome, what's wrong with our theory?" If you're observing something in nature, in this case people, calling nature inconsistent doesn't make sense. Nature is consistent. Your theory has problems if it calls nature inconsistent.
I wouldn't say they're calling nature inconsistent. They're calling the supposition inconsistent. Which is more or less the same as saying the theory is inconsistent.
Re: Moral Judgments Depend on What Language We’re Speaking
#26Correlation vs.causation. Here we go again ...
That's right. And it's not even clear that they found a correlation that would hold up in different experimental conditions.
The paper is at http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna... , and unfortunately has the provocative title "Your Morals Depend on Language", instead of a more accurate title like "There's a possibility that some people's morals are correlated with language, but we're not sure and we're also not sure if that's true for everybody because our sampling is insufficient to allow us to draw such a conclusion".
Re: Moral Judgments Depend on What Language We’re Speaking
#27> in general people react less strongly to emotional expressions in a foreign language As a non-native English speaker, I wonder if this affects programming. Do English-speaking people find beautiful programs written in English more beautiful than others ? Anyone here programmed in both their mother tongue and one other language ?
(French native speaker here). From the developers I know (and that is still my case to some extent) people refer to the keywords as their function rather than their meaning. So when you see a 'while' or a 'for' loop, you just interpret it as a loop regardless of the original meaning of the word, it's not English anymore, it's just code blocks. But I'm wondering how it's interpreted from the point of view of a native…
Russian native speaker here. I too never think of keywords as words in english language.
As for function/variable/type/etc names and comments -- in Russia english is the standard. Russian is rarely used in comments, and using russian in code is frowned upon, so it (almost) never happens.
> But I'm wondering how it's interpreted from the point of view of a native speaker.
In Russia, we have company called 1C. One of the software products of this company is "1C: Enterprise". This product has some built-in language(for automatizing common accountant tasks or something like that). And keywords in this language are russian words.
I've never programmed in this language. And code in it looks really horrible to me, to the point of being repulsive. Here is hello world program, in case anyone is interested:
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Встроенный_язык_программирован...
Re: Moral Judgments Depend on What Language We’re Speaking
#28Gives new meaning to "Are you speaking my language?" It can have moral overtones too.
Re: Moral Judgments Depend on What Language We’re Speaking
#29Our Personal Predictions about Moral Judgments in Contrived Hypothetical Situations while Being Observed by a Third Party Depend on What Language We're Reading
I mean seriously, if you're going to test the slight difference in people's moral attitudes based on the method of information consumption at least find it important to consistently distinguish between oral and written.
That aside, this article, unless you ignore what was actually tested and just imagine it to be what you want, is saying absolutely nothing.
Re: Moral Judgments Depend on What Language We’re Speaking
#30The paper (http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...) is not an example of good science.
First: did they even find some kind of correlation, or is it just a statistical aberration? Second: if they found a real correlation, is their explanation of why that correlation exists correct?
IMHO, their evidence does not support their claims. Where are the controls? What are the sampling biases? What are possible alternative explanations, and why are those not considered? What is the relationship between a person's response to a hypothetical situation and his/her actions in a real one?
They greatly overstate their findings in the discussion section. It's almost painful to read:
> We have shown that people’s moral judgments and decisions depend on the native-ness of the language in which a dilemma is presented, becoming more utilitarian in a foreign language.
> Most likely, a foreign language reduces emotional reactivity, promoting cost-benefit considerations, leading to an increase in utilitarian judgments.
> This discovery has important consequences for our globalized world as many individuals make moral judgments in both native and foreign languages. Immigrants face personal moral dilemmas in a foreign language on a daily basis, sometimes dilemmas with even larger stakes such as when serving as a jury member in a trial.
> Given that what we have discovered is surprising and unintuitive, increasing awareness of the impact of using a foreign language may help us check our decision-making context and make choices that are based on the things that should really matter.
> Foreign languages are used in international, multilingual forums such as the United Nations, the European Union, large investment firms and international corporations in general. Moral choices within these domains can be explained better, and are made more predictable by our discovery.
Wait, what? When was that covered in the rest of the paper?