PEOPLE THINK MORE rationally in their second, less familiar language, according to a new study.

Looking at the decision making processes of bilinguals, a team of  psychologists at the University of Chicago found that the extra work of thinking and speaking in a foreign tongue makes people more reliant on unconscious, automatic mental processes.

This is because our decisions are often heavily influenced by the emotions surrounding the words we read or hear in our first language. However, this bias is removed when we use a language that is less familiar to us.

“We demonstrated that some biases are reduced when made in a foreign language,” Boaz Keysar told TheJournal.ie. “That could suggest in some situations you would be less biased and make more benefical decisions” he added.

However, he cautioned against people making important financial or investment decisions in a second tongue.

Keysar and his research team randomly assigned a problem solving task to  a group of bilinguals in one of the two languages they knew.

Everyone in the group started by reading the following scenario:

Recently, a dangerous new disease has been going around. Without medicine, 600,000 people will die from it. In order to save these people, two types of medicine are being made.

Some people then read…

If you choose Medicine A, 200,000 people will be saved.

If you choose Medicine B, there is a 33.3% chance that 600,000 people will be saved and a 66.6% chance that no one will be saved.

Which medicine do you choose?

While others read…

If you choose Medicine A, 400,000 people will die.

If you choose Medicine B, there is a 33.3% chance no one will die and a 66.6% chance that 600,000 people will die.

Both scenarios give the same result. However, because the question has been framed differently, the decisions people made were different.

This is because the first question is referred to in terms of ‘gains’, while the second one is referred to in terms of losses. And because people are more risk averse when things are termed to them in terms of gains and losses, when they were presented with the problem in their native tongue, 77% of people preferred medicine A in the first scenario. Meanwhile, 47% of people took  medicine A in the second scenario.

However, when people made the decision in a foreign tongue, Medicine A was chosen equally as much regardless of whether people were given the first or second scenario.

Whether this means you should start using Irish or French in your daily decision making processes has yet to be seen.