Limits of the foreign language effect: intertemporal choice

Abstract

Intertemporal choice requires one to decide between smaller sooner and larger later payoffs and is captured by discount rates. Across two preregistered experiments testing three language pairs (Experiment 1) and with incentivized participants (Experiment 2), we found no evidence that using a foreign language benefited intertemporal choices. On the contrary, there was some evidence of stronger discounting when a foreign language was used. Our results confirm that more reflective individuals tend to discount less strongly. Thinking in a foreign language did not affect consistency of decisions between payoffs with different defaults in general but can distort the cognitive reflection effects on such consistency. Finally, our findings show that the effects of using a foreign language are robust individual differences in cognitive reflection.

Using a foreign language does not make you think more: Null effects of using a foreign language on cognitive reflection and numeracy

“…Experiment 1A. -Data for Experiments 1A and 1B come from Białek et al, (2022). N = 240 participants responded to discounting items presented in four blocks: accelerating gains, delaying gains, accelerating losses, and delaying losses.…”

How a second language and its future time reference impacts intertemporal decision: A holistic perspective

“…However, whether this is the case remains unclear. To the best of our knowledge, the only related study did not support such a prediction (Białek, Domurat, Paruzel-Czachura, & Muda, 2021). Instead, they found that participants speaking a second language did not change or even slightly increase their temporal discount rate.…”

“…Białek et al (2021) report a marginally significant (p = .077) interaction between second language and cognitive reflection on the decision consistency. Although the FLE may not impact cognitive reflection (Białek et al, 2021;Costa, Foucart, Arnon, et al, 2014), Białek et al (2021) suggest that using a second language may disable the ability to use cognitive reflection to guide intertemporal decision.…”

Why should we study the Foreign Language Effect: debiasing through affecting metacognition?

“…For example, the performance in various heuristic-and-biases tasks was unaffected by the language used (Maekelae & Pfuhl, 2019;Vives et al, 2018). Some negative effects of using a foreign language were also reported, such as decreased accuracy in logical reasoning (Białek et al, 2020), increased impatience (Białek et al, 2022), and difficulty in distinguishing between true and fake news (Muda et al, 2023).…”