Some Challenges for Research on Emotion and Moral Judgment: The Moral Foreign-Language Effect as a Case Study

Abstract

In this article, we discuss a number of challenges with the empirical study of emotion and its relation to moral judgment. We examine a case study involving the moral foreign-language effect, according to which people show an increased utilitarian response tendency in moral dilemmas when using their non-native language. One important proposed explanation for this effect is that using one’s non-native language reduces emotional arousal, and that reduced emotion is responsible for this tendency. We offer reasons to think that there is insufficient evidence for accepting this explanation at present. We argue that there are three themes that constrain our current ability to draw firm empirical conclusions: 1) the frequent use of proxies or partial measures for emotions, 2) the lack of a predictive and generalizable theory of emotion and specific emotion-types, and 3) the obscurity of a baseline level of neutrality with respect to participant emotion. These lessons apply not only to research on the moral foreign-language effect, but to empirical research in moral psychology more generally.

Bilinguals on the footbridge: the role of foreign-language proficiency in moral decision making

“…For example, in deciding whether one person should die to save other five based on one's direct action, individuals' responses exhibit more negative emotional valence and arousal (Christensen et al, 2014 ; Tasso et al, 2017 ), alongside increased brain activation of emotional processing areas (Greene et al, 2001 ; Schaich Borg et al, 2006 ; Xue et al, 2013 ). Yet, concepts such as pure “emotion reduction” or “cognitive load excess” have been deemed too broad (McFarlane & Perez, 2020 ) or empirically inconclusive (Hadjichristidis et al, 2019 ) respectively, to be pointed as direct originators of the MFLE. Instead, it is likely that only specific processes of affectivity and cognitive control are involved in bilingual decision making on incongruent moral dilemmas.…”

“…For example, the notion of reduced emotional responses in L2 has been proposed as a partial explanation of the MFLE since the first report on the topic (Costa et al, 2014b ). However, conceptualizations of emotional responses often overlook critical factors and fail to capture their full complexity (McFarlane & Perez, 2020 ), which may partly account for the mixed results regarding emotional reduction in personal moral dilemmas (Chan et al, 2016 ; McDonald et al, 2017 ; Wong & Ng, 2018 ; Youssef et al, 2012 ). Our proposed framework, and the field at large, could be enriched by more fine-grained approaches to this construct.…”

Moral judgements in a foreign language: Expressing emotions and justifying decisions

“…However, the influential role of psychological distance in decision-making and, particularly in moral choices, is still debated (Eyal et al, 2008; Gong & Medin, 2012; Žeželj & Jokić, 2014). The third explanation refers to the reduction of emotional arousal that certain types of moral dilemmas may evoke (McFarlane & Cipolletti Perez, 2020). As mentioned previously, this study aimed to investigate this hypothesis, which we refer to here as the Reduced Emotionality Hypothesis and present in more detail in the next section.…”

“…Highly emotional moral dilemmas tend to provoke stronger emotional responses (Cecchetto et al, 2017) and lead to more deontological inclinations (Greene, 2007). As McFarlane and Cipolletti Perez (2020) pointed out, ‘deontological responses are always perfectly correlated with emotional arousal and utilitarian responses are always correlated with a lack of this arousal in a range of moral dilemmas’ (p. 4). The question that arises is how an emotional response is manifested verbally – beyond any yes or no responses – when people are asked to justify their moral decisions in their L1 or their L2.…”

The Normative Significance of Empirical Moral Psychology

“…In the next paper Steven McFarlane and Heather Cipolletti Perez analyze empirical research on the relation between using native language and being emotional on the example of the so-called moral foreign-language effect (MFLE). It assumes that individuals reasoning in a foreign language more often prefer a utilitarian option over a deontological one (McFarlane, Perez 2020). The Authors notice important methodological problems with measuring emotions, since experiments obviously do not test for "emotions" directly, but use different proxies and different methods (changes in skin conductance, neuroscientifi c evidence, behavioral response patterns, patterns in judgment responses, qualitative reports of the felt emotion, etc.).…”