TIL bilinguals given the trolley problem in their native language chose to sacrifice one to save five less than 20% of the time. In their second language, about 50% chose to, because a foreign language lowers emotional resonance and triggers more utilitarian reasoning.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/comments?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0094842
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https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1rwykha/til_bilinguals_given_the_trolley_problem_in_their/
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Fascinating paper: Your Morals Depend on Language (Costa et al., 2014). People make significantly more utilitarian choices in moral dilemmas when the dilemma is presented in a foreign language, apparently because a foreign language dulls emotional responses and shifts the balance toward deliberative thinking.
It matches my own experience. Thinking in a foreign language feels like rendering graphics without GPU acceleration: everything runs on raw CPU, slower and more laborious. After a full day of conversations in English or Japanese, I'm physically exhausted in a way that Korean never does to me. What I didn't quite register until reading this paper is that the “GPU” doing all that fast, effortless processing is largely the emotional system. When it steps back, you end up doing more of the reasoning yourself. Whether that's a feature or a bug probably depends on what you're deciding.
