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.

@hongminhee I have often noticed that it's a lot easier to swear in a second language, because the emotional hurdle is lower. I've always considered that it could be because I wasn't raised in it. Maybe it's a related mechanism.

@hongminhee "Thinking in a foreign language feels like rendering graphics without GPU acceleration" is such a good way to put it!

> that the “GPU” doing all that fast, effortless processing is largely the emotional system

@hongminhee I don't think so... to me it sounds more plausible that the neural pathways that are used for native language are a lot more used than the ones for foreign languages so they trigger with less energy expenditure.

Speaking your native language is basically "muscle memory", speaking in a different language is like navigating a maze: you have to plan your route, change direction often, sometimes backtrack all together, and as such is requiring a lot more brain power.

Caveat emptor: these are non scientific musings, I have no citation for anything. :D

@hongminhee Looks like a strong effect, too, and on large, diverse samples. I didn’t expect it to be so strong.