This is the science section, so here's some interesting research findings :
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tl;dr An obvious and immediate counterargument for this whole thing is that, assuming this isn't just statistical noise, the difference in morality comes from nonlinguistic cultural asymmetries of the different groups.
The idea of language shaping cognition is actually an increadibly contentious one in the linguistic-psychology of language-cognitive science interface. If you're interested in this kind of stuff look up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity or search for work done on the "Sapir-Worf" hypothesis.
I've seen some Linguists become enraged at the idea, going so far as to not only call it provably wrong, but also describing it as racist and imperialistic since it defines different language speakers (and so people from different cultures) as fundamentally different types of humans, which is the exact opposite of (the fairly successful) Chomskian linguistics.
Of course, the truth is a lot less clear. There's been plenty of fantastic work disproving the entire range from weak to strong Worfian theories, typically coming out of the linguistics camp. Frankly, I'm less familiar with the work from the psychology of language perspective, but I'm sure the researchers in this field have been producing equally high class work in support of some parts of linguistic relativity.
I'm frustrated by this summary of the work. It presents as facts work that is clearly experimental and needs to be replicated by peers in the field. I actually went through the paper to read the work and here's some parts that I take issue with:
1) The distribution of language speakers was far too lean to make these claims. Take a look:
The actual number of different language speakers were: English/Spanish (N = 112) in the US, Korean/English (N = 80) in Korea, English/French (N = 107) in France, and Spanish or English/Hebrew (N = 18) in Israel. One study with at most 100 members in each group is hardly sufficient to make any conclusions on the nature of cognition -- a notoriously noisy field.
2) Nowhere in the paper did they include standard deviations, standard errors, or any kind of measure of dispersion regarding their effect size! This was particularly upsets me. Not only did they not include them in their figures, but they were nowhere to be found in the text! Look at the following plots
and
I wouldn't be surprised if the signal-to-noise ratio for this type of effect was huge (i.e. massive error bars), but alas, we'll never know since I don't want to waste my time contacting these authors for their data.
It's surprising that this kind of omission would make it into a journal like this. I don't really know much about the academic quality of PLOS ONE, but to put it in context I would have been hanged had I not included any dispersion metric back in my research.
tl;dr2 I got triggered by mediocre science.
I agree that thinking in language A or B doesn't make a difference in morality. Languages that are typically - in daily communications - used with larger vocabulary, will have less ambiguity in the communication about ethical matters. For instance, in English and French, the verb "to love"/"aimer" is used to cover many many different loads, e.g. "I love The Rolling Stones". In English, that's a strong statement that one really likes the Rolling Stones, but it has nothing to do with "love", in French though "J'aime les Rolling Stones" is a bit lukewarm lol, it's not as strong as "J'adore les Stones", which of course is also not literal. In Germanic languages, this will also be used in "new speak" terms, but with completely different intonation, and if the intonation cannot be varied, another term will be used, e.g. "feiern" in German, which means celebrate. Same goes for "hate" of which the French equivalent would be "detester", which is not exactly the same either.
But the feelings behind the words are not depending on the words, but on the feelings. Ethics are all about feelings. The language is not, it is but a means of communication, that is depending on fashion, habit, social stratus, education, etc... but morality is not... often people with more language skills will take morality lighter, sometimes not, but the language as such is not the factor in this variance.
What I do believe, is that people that learn more different languages and cultures, are better equipped to form their own morality in a better and more solid way, because they see things from more points of view.
I truly don't mean to be crude, especially since I agree with you! However, the main point of this line of work is that despite "common sense" that language is purely communicative and does not shape how we perceive and understand the world, it turns out that language does shape cognition just as cognition shapes language (or so they claim). You can say "I believe" as much as you want, but until it's substantiated with either some well-defined model/theory, citations, or some experimental resrearch, it isn't a particularly powerful counterargument.
That said, I do agree. An interesting point in this debate is that, as hinted above, the argument is fundamentally circular. I don't think it's contentious to say that how we think affects our language (i.e. the reverse of this hypothesis). So, we have our cognition affecting linguistic model which is then proposed to affect our cognition...? It's the chicken and the egg problem, and if we go down this road it becomes untestable by infinite descent.
My biggest gripe is that it's almost impossible to completely disprove this theory. Unless some great theorist generates a provably correct model that disallows this effect, there will always be some proponent of the language-affecting-cognition hypothesis that says something like
Ok, well you just disproved that speakers of languages A and B don't differ on cognitive process XYZ, but that doesn't disprove that speakers of some language differ on some cognitive processes.
On the other hand, it's really easy to make this hypothesis unfairly taboo to research by labelling it as bigotted. I mentioned earlier that some opponents call it racist, and I've seen some others then associate some larger figures in the field as (without evidence) prejudiced. In such a case there becomes a "chilling effect" in the field since nobody wants to touch the subject with a 40-foot pole less their name be associated with intolerant views. There's truly few things worse than preventing an unfalsified (but falsifiable) line of questioning from being answered.
On the other... other hand, research titles that say "SPEAKERS OF DIFFERENT LANGUAGES DIFFER ON THEIR WORLDVIEW" is fundamentally easier to publish and will receive more media coverage than research entitled "SPEAKERS OF DIFFERENT LANGUAGES DON'T DIFFER ON THEIR WORLDVIEW" since positive results are always sexier and easier to pass through.
Well it's a theory, there is no need to disprove it, because it's not a proven theory, in either way it's just theory. Problems start when people start taking theories as rules or laws. That's when nasty things happen like throwing homosexuals from rooftops or stoning women that go out unaccompanied by a senior male family member... especially less educated people have a tendency to reflect their own demons and judge others for it. Some researchers have the same tendency, they figure out some theory that is but a reflection of a personal demon that is in itself completely irrelevant for the rest of the world. But that's the way things work... entropy lol
Well it's a theory, there is no need to disprove it, because it's not a proven theory, in either way it's just theory. Problems start when people start taking theories as rules or laws
This is precisely why I really don't like the popular usage of "theory" and the general use of "theory" in the social sciences! For this reason I try to stick with "hypothesis" myself.
entropy lol
Yeah I mean if we take a step back for a minute to look at the long view, in 10^10^10 years we'll all just be Hawking evaporated out of existence into a homogeneous soup of empty space anyway.
How does this comport with history? Cultures tend to start out moral, then slide into depravity. Rome and the games, Germany and the ovens, Japan going from the code of Bushido to slackerism. The puritans and the staff at porn hub speak basically the same language. The language did not change that much over 400 years, the morals did.
I think that the claim that is of most interest here would be that a person's moral thinking would tend to work differently when the same person is using a second language instead of their mother tongue, regardless of which language either one is.
we hypothesize that moral judgments in a foreign language would be less affected by the emotional reactivity elicited by a dilemma. This hypothesis makes a clear prediction: when faced with moral dilemmas in a foreign language, utilitarian judgments should be more common than in a native language
That wouldn't have much to do with cultural differences or specific linguistic particularities. The study tries to take that into account to some extent.
The main issue I have with it is that it takes different people for each test. It doesn't test the same individual both in their native language and also in their second language to see if the same person would have a different form of reasoning in a quasi-identical situation if only the language being used was different.
People who are fluent in more than one language don't have to mentally translate anything prior to the ethical reasoning, and so they would most likely be interpreting the problem in the language that they recieved it in.
Do you mean the reasoning or the normative discipline?
Ethicists who based the main heuristics of their theories on feelings are historically a minority. Most ethicists and moral philosophers have put forward largely reason-based theories. I mean, the two main currents in ethics (utilitarianism and deontology) both have in common a radical rejection of subjective feelings and emotions as determining factors for ethical action.
That's beside the point. We're talking about the individual level here. We can't extrapolate about societies because societies are not multilingual; people are.
The claim here is that people would make ethical reasonings differently in their second language than they would in their mother tongue.
And yet here we report evidence that people using a foreign language make substantially more utilitarian decisions when faced with such moral dilemmas.
"Foreign language", as in when a given individual is not using his/her/their native language. i.e., speaking in and responding to a language that is "foreign" to them.
And here, "utilitarian" refers to reasonings whose form falls within the spectrum of the formal theory of utilitarianism. ("utilitarian" doesn't mean that the reasoning itself is more useful or has more utility, but that the outcome was thought to maximize utility while considering all interests equally)
It's a difference in the form of reasoning, not necessarily a difference in outcome.
I think you may be misunderstanding the claim the study is making and the starting hypothesis.
Hence, we hypothesize that moral judgments in a foreign language would be less affected by the emotional reactivity elicited by a dilemma. This hypothesis makes a clear prediction: when faced with moral dilemmas in a foreign language, utilitarian judgments should be more common than in a native language.
It doesn't seem to be about linguistic relativity. The question isn't about wether or not the use of a certain language instead of a certain other language would have an certain impact on cognition.
It has to do with how involved or detached someone is when using their non-native language as opposed to using their native language, and how that would be reflected in the form of reasoning that is favored in making an ethical decision in either context. Regardless of the structure of the languages involved. It is more a matter of the individual's familiarity with it.
And it's only about a very specific type of cognitive activity, not about the broad nature of cognition.
Now, your point about the size of each group is a very good one. It would be interesting to see a similar study done on larger and more diverse groups worldwide.