Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Recent research has suggested that using a foreign languageto present hypothetical moral dilemmas increases the rate ofutilitarian judgments about those dilemmas (e.g., Greene et al,2001) and decreases incoherency between judgments inframing effect tasks (e.g., Tversky & Kahneman, 1981; seeCosta, Foucart, Arnon, Aparici, & Apesteguia, 2014; Costa,Foucart, Hayakawa, Aparici, Apesteguia, Heafner, & Keysar,2014; Keysar, Hayakawa, & An, 2012). However, existingresearch has mainly investigated this effect using between-participants designs (i.e., different participants in the foreignand native language conditions). Such designs are unable toexclude non-equivalent conditions as a confounding variable.In contrast, this study examined the foreign language effectusing a within-subjects design (i.e., all participants respondedto moral dilemmas (Greene et al, 2001) and framing effecttasks (Tversky & Kahneman, 1981) in both their native andforeign languages. The “foreign language effect” wasreplicated, excluding semantic non-equivalence betweenlanguage conditions as a potential confound. This resultsupports the hypothesis that the foreign language effect isindependent of meaning.