Thinking More Or Feeling Less?Explaining Why Using A Foreign Language Reduces Our Social Preferences

Social preference is an extremely important field in behavioral decision-making research,which is mainly manifested in fairness,altruism,cooperation and reciprocal behavior.At present,one of the most common(specific)situations in real life,which has been neglected by social preference research,is foreign situation.After Keysar et al.found that foreign languages weaken the framing effect of decision-making bias in 2012,researchers began to pay attention to how foreign situations affect people’s decision-making behavior.This paper intends to introduce the latest research on foreign language effects into traditional social preference studies,and to explore whether and how foreign use affects people’s social preferences based on the general explanatory mechanism of foreign effects(i.e.from the perspective of dual processing theory).This paper assumes that foreign situations are the main points of the research paradigm,that is,subjects choose allocation schemes in their native/foreign situations respectively:in foreign situations,subjects have a higher tolerance of unfairness,that is,they are more rational in making decisions;in native situations,subjects have a lower tolerance of unfairness.In this study,three series of studies were conducted to verify the hypotheses.Study 1 recruited 395 subjects,using a design of 2(situational:native vs.foreign)*3(allocation:5/5 vs.7/3 vs.9/1)between the subjects.Subjects were tested by questionnaires on their mobile phones.In foreign situation,the subjects’aversion to unfairness of inferiority was reduced,and rejection rates of 7/3 and 9/1 allocation schemes were significantly lower than those of the native,and the rejection rates of 5/5 were the same as those of the native.In study 2,99 subjects were recruited and experimented in a standardized laboratory with a mixed design of 2(situational:native vs.foreign)*5(allocation scheme:10/0 vs.9/1 vs.8/2 vs.7/3 vs.6/4)*2(matching gender:male vs.female).Results showed that in foreign,8/2 and 7/3 of the subjects chose more self-interested allocation.And in foreign situations,the choice of subjects is related to the gender of the matched subjects.The same allocation,compared with men,when facing women,chooses fairness more.Study 3,based on the emotional/cognitive pathway of the dual-processing theory,found that the difference in choosing alternatives in two situations was due to the different sensibility to negative emotions,and the subjects’perception of negative emotions decreased in foreign situation.The difference of choice was not caused by the difference of reaction time between the two situations.