The moral foreign language effect is stable across presentation modalities

Muda, Rafał; Pieńkosz, Damian; Francis, K; Białek, Michał

doi:10.1177/1747021820935072

The moral foreign language effect is stable across presentation modalities

Muda, Rafał; Pieńkosz, Damian; Francis, K; Białek, Michał

Authors

Rafał Muda

Damian Pieńkosz

Kathryn Francis k.francis@keele.ac.uk

Michał Białek

Abstract

<jats:p> 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 at https://osf.io/qbjxn/ . </jats:p>

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Jun 2, 2020
Publication Date	Jun 2, 2020
Journal	Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
Print ISSN	1747-0218
Publisher	Routledge
Pages	1930 - 1938
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1177/1747021820935072
Keywords	Foreign language effect, bilingualism, moral judgements, modalities
Publisher URL	https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1747021820935072