
Thinking in a Foreign Tongue Reduces Decision Biases - sakai
http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/04/18/0956797611432178.abstract?rss=1
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sakai
Finally found a link to the full text PDF:
[http://portal.unitbv.ro/proxy/download.ashx?dec=1&url=uh...](http://portal.unitbv.ro/proxy/download.ashx?dec=1&url=uh4QwdELmSQKwh0PmD07tSpMxqiKsSZJmS0LvD4BvD3LtqfOvhALl9aNl8YM0cYN1cYM1noS0PAT09eN0dlOlnwUmCtRvgMKwg4CB6X)!

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AlexLegg
I wonder what percentage of the students had studied game theory and realised
that the expected outcome of either medicine was the same...

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hef19898
Speaking English and french as foreign languages (germen being the mother
language), I can largely agree with the OP, from my experience. While it's
hard to explain why it is like that, for me it takes out some cultural biases
you most of the time have when you think in your own language (profiency in
said foreign language required).

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rollypolly
If someone has a native-level of fluency in more than one language, would the
decision-making bias remain?

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hef19898
Good question, possibel that it goes the way as with dreams. Have to ask my
girl-friend about it...

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personlurking
Living abroad, half the time I find myself thinking in another language. I
recently decided which foreign language I should spend my time on next. Turns
out my teacher doesn't speak English so I'll be learning my fourth and final
language via my third language. Confused? I am, though I suppose I'm making a
sound decision...

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bitops
I learned some Spanish in English, which is not my native language. I've found
the key is to think in whatever language you are using most as much as you
can; at least in the beginning.

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aangjie
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) .

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jgeralnik
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.

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aangjie
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

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krollew
Sounds 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.

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kenron
this 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!

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ajuc
Kipling noticed this - in his book Kim (Indian) is thinking in English to
overcome hypnosis :)

