The moral foreign language effect is stable across presentation modalities. Issue 11 (November 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Muda, Rafał; Pieńkosz, Damian; Francis, Kathryn B; Białek, Michał
• Is Part Of: Quarterly journal of experimental psychology. Volume 73:Issue 11(2020)
• Page Start: 1930
• Page End: 1938
• Publication Date: 2020-11
• Subjects: Foreign language effect -- bilingualism -- moral judgements -- modalities; Psychology, Experimental -- Periodicals; Psychophysiology -- Periodicals; Psychology, Comparative -- Periodicals; 150.72405
• DOI: 10.1177/1747021820935072
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1747-0218

Abstract

People's judgements and decisions often change when made in their foreign language. Existing research testing this foreign language effect has predominantly used text-based stimuli with little research focusing on the impact of listening to audio stimuli on the effect. The only existing study on this topic found shifts in people's moral decisions only in the audio modality. First, by reanalysing the data from this previous study and by collecting data in an additional experiment, we found no consistent effects of using foreign language on moral judgements. Second, in both data sets, we found no significant language by modality interaction. Overall, our results highlight the need for more robust testing of the foreign language effect, and its boundary conditions. However, modality of presentation does not appear to be a candidate for explaining its variability. Data and materials for this experiment are available athttps://osf.io/qbjxn/ .