Moral Judgement in Early Bilinguals: Language Dominance Influences Responses to Moral Dilemmas.

Galston Wong,Bee Chin Ng

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01070

Abstract

The Foreign-Language effect (FLe) on morality describes how late bilinguals make different decisions on moral judgements, when presented in either their native or foreign language. However the relevance of this phenomenon to early bilinguals, where a language's “nativeness” is less distinct, is unknown. This study aims to verify the effect of early bilinguals' languages on their moral decisions and examine how language experience may influence these decisions. Eighty-six early English-Chinese bilinguals were asked to perform a moral dilemmas task consisting of personal and impersonal dilemmas, in either English or Mandarin Chinese. Information on language experience factors were also collected from the participants. Findings suggest that early bilinguals do show evidence of a language effect on their moral decisions, which is dependent on how dominant they are in the language. Particularly, the more dominant participants were in their tested language, the larger the difference between their personal and impersonal dilemma response choice. In light of these findings, the study discusses the need to re-examine how we conceptualize the FLe phenomenon and its implications on bilinguals' moral judgement. It also addresses the importance of treating bilingualism as multidimensional, rather than a unitary variable.

Highlights

Would you sacrifice one life to save the lives of several others? Researchers in the field of moral psychology have studied this conundrum in order to understand individuals’ motivations and the decision-making processes that occur in such dilemma scenarios
The present study investigated the relationship between early English-Chinese bilinguals’ moral judgement and their language dominance
We found no differences in utilitarian ratings between the English and the Mandarin Chinese version of the moral dilemma task across the different scenarios

Summary

Introduction

Would you sacrifice one life to save the lives of several others? Researchers in the field of moral psychology have studied this conundrum in order to understand individuals’ motivations and the decision-making processes that occur in such dilemma scenarios. People were more likely to sacrifice an individual life when the choice of action was impersonal rather than personal (e.g., Royzman and Baron, 2002; Greene et al, 2009; Kusev et al, 2016). Other contextual factors include characteristics of the individuals described in the scenarios, such as their race or group identity (e.g., Uhlmann et al, 2009; Swann et al, 2010). These studies showed how people were more likely to make moral decisions that benefited individuals who were part of their in-group compared to the out-group

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion