Abstract
We test emotional distancing in a second language (L2) by replicating an experiment by Keysar, Hayakawa, and An (2012) on making decisions under the framing effect (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979). With their participants’ average Age of Acquisition (AoA) being around and beyond puberty, autonomic arousal was evident in native language (L1) but absent in L2. Our study showed no difference between L1 and L2 when AoA was around 4. However, when average AoA was around 7.7, autonomic arousal was evident in L1 but absent in L2, predicting an AoA threshold affecting L2 affective processing significantly earlier than puberty.
Highlights
According to Prospect Theory, humans are irrational decision makers because they respond differently to equivalent situations when they are framed differently
We asked the following question: Would the KHA results obtain for a new bilingual population? That is, if we present a new sample of late bilinguals with the dilemma in Table 1, will they exhibit decision biases in L1 but not in L2? If so, what is the Age of Acquisition (AoA) threshold for this to be observed? We replicated KHA’s experiment on Arabic/ English bilingual university students in Jordan
Experiment 1 showed a presence of the framing effect regardless of language
Summary
According to Prospect Theory, humans are irrational decision makers because they respond differently to equivalent situations when they are framed differently. Participants exhibited decision biases in L1 as predicted by Prospect Theory, but the bias was not evident in L2. This implied that late bilinguals have overridden decision bias due to framing because making decisions in a foreign language reduces emotional reaction (what we refer to as autonomous arousal) to the moral dilemma they were faced with. We believe that this implies more rationality of decision making in L2
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