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Moral Judgments Depend on What Language We’re Speaking

nytimes.com

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Re: Moral Judgments Depend on What Language We’re Speaking

#31

Post by icebraining »

eatitraw wrote: post #27
realusername wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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 t…

We have a similar language here in Portugal (I believe it's a copy of Delphi) and I also find it extremely unpleasant to even read it.

Re: Moral Judgments Depend on What Language We’re Speaking

#32

Post by emodendroket »

infruset wrote: post #4

I 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…

That would rather defeat the purpose of the study... if neither language is really foreign to you how could we look at the difference using a foreign language makes?

Re: Moral Judgments Depend on What Language We’re Speaking

#33

Post by hartator »

Maybe when you ask native people in a foreign language, they perceive it as a game and are less serious?

Maybe this "results" are nothing to do with moral judgment?

I am a native french speaker and live in the U.S. "Moral" decisions feel the same for me at least. I will be more influenced by the culture around me than a choice of words...

Re: Moral Judgments Depend on What Language We’re Speaking

#34

Post by emodendroket »

wvh wrote: post #2

Interesting. I speak 6 languages and actively think in 3–4 of those, and I notice slight changes in my attitudes and behaviour depending on the active language in my head. It might be interesting to experiment and find out if not just the fact that it's a foreign language matters, but also the influence of the actual choice of language.

That's a question that's already had a lot of attention devoted to it; look up the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis if you're interested.

Re: Moral Judgments Depend on What Language We’re Speaking

#35

Post by JumpCrisscross »

mattfenwick wrote: post #30

The 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 a…

The premise had more potential. One set of individuals, evaluating a scenario presented to them in their native tongue, were found to react in a statistically significantly different way from a second set of individuals, evaluating the same scenario in a language foreign to them.

The problem is the people in group one are not the same as those in group two. Statistical controls can mitigate the risk of randomness crashing the party. But there is an experimental solution: have the same people evaluate similar situations in a foreign and their native tongues. That said, something gained if it inspires a more rigorous study.

Re: Moral Judgments Depend on What Language We’re Speaking

#36

Post by philh »

rayiner wrote: post #22
thret wrote: post #10

When 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.

If blame is a meaningful thing to assign, I'm going to assign at least some of it to you for not watching your son, and quite a lot of it to you for not flipping the switch.

I much prefer a world where you are sad and your son is dead, to a world where hundreds of people are dead, all their families are sad, and your son is alive.

(That said, it's at least somewhat plausible that if I was in that situation, I would also make the wrong decision. That doesn't make it right.)

Re: Moral Judgments Depend on What Language We’re Speaking

#37

Post by watwut »

realusername wrote: post #6
simula67 wrote: post #3

> 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…

Same here. Keywords are just strings with standard meaning I learned and got used to. They are not actual words and I do not relate them to their real-world meanings.

Microsoft Excel uses different function names in different languages. It is hell. I learned what the function is used to be named in English and it is hard to guess what translated version would be.

Re: Moral Judgments Depend on What Language We’re Speaking

#38

Post by infruset »

emodendroket wrote: post #32
infruset wrote: post #4

I 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…

That would rather defeat the purpose of the study... if neither language is really foreign to you how could we look at the difference using a foreign language makes?

Ok, you're right. I was trying to compensate the fact that the language is learned in a classroom as opposed to in real life. I guess I had the intuition that bilingual people still have a language that is "more native" than the other, but I don't know if that is true.

However, I don't understand the downvote?

Re: Moral Judgments Depend on What Language We’re Speaking

#39

Post by bluecalm »

GFischer wrote: post #7

I really liked being introduced to the Trolley Problem (especially the second formulation), I hadn't heard of it before. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem I spent more time than I should reading about several possible answers :) for example: http://philosophyfaculty.ucsd.edu/faculty/rarneson/Courses/t... some with a libertarian slant: http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2012/08/the-trolley-non... http://f…

I find the focus on doing nothing versus taking action (like in the 2nd paper you linked) misguided. Utilitarian principle has place in about every serious ethical system in the history. Doing nothing to avoid responsibility doesn't. You can't really use that argument without reference to cost of action and in Trolley Problem that is conveniently close to 0. There are other factors like ensuring that people feel safe (so they don't need to worry about doctors killing them to harvest the organs) and that we value life of healthy young person higher than older and sick. Assessing how far you can go using your personal utility over one of the population is another interesting problem (mother would be justified by most for choosing to kill 2 people instead of her own child in a Trolley Problem but would be condemned by choosing to kill a whole town).

In the surgeon's example there is also cost of killing (surgeon as well as patient may feel bad about it or some other values in moral system of a person might be compromised like honor or keeping an oath) but it's again only matter of weighting the arguments not action vs inaction. It's easy to realize once you up the scale a bit: make it a scenario with whole town dying instead of young healthy person and you will get a consensus. From that you can see that action vs inaction isn't really what the problem is about.

Re: Moral Judgments Depend on What Language We’re Speaking

#40

Post by cyphunk »

hmm psychology is fun but... I wont trust the results of this study until they ask the same set of train-switch-murderous-multilingual users to also choose between chocolate cake or fruit salad [1].

1: http://blogs.worldbank.org/impactevaluations/fruit-salad-cho...

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