Decision-making is an important part of our daily life. Every day we face different types of dilemmas and have to make decisions that will affect – to a greater or lesser degree – ourselves and the people around us. Recent studies have found that the use of a second language (L2) leads to more deliberative and less emotional moral judgments among bilinguals (Białek et al., 2019;Brouwer, 2021; Cipolletti et al., 2016; Costa et al., 2014; Dylman & Champoux-Larsson, 2020; Geipel et al., 2015a, 2015b; among others). However, most of these studies used unrealistic dilemmas, which are unlikely to happen in real life and lack ecological validity. Moreover, the emotions felt by participants in those studies was explored using forced-choice tasks that limit the number and variety of emotions that people can feel and report.
Our study examined whether the effect of language in bilinguals' moral judgment is also present in realistic moral dilemmas. To this end, we asked Spanish-English bilinguals to make a moral decision and to express their emotions regarding two moral dilemmas: the cheater's dilemma, where one must decide whether to tell their partner they cheated on them, and the A friend's choice dilemma, where one must decide whether to go to the police and report that their best friend committed a crime in order to help an innocent person that has been accused of this crime. The results showed a main effect of dilemma, as well as an interaction effect between language condition and dilemma, which were statistically significant. The predominant emotion in L1 in both realistic moral dilemmas was fear, whereas guilt overrode fear in the L2 condition. Moreover, the use of the L2 significantly reduced the presence of fear during or after reading the two moral dilemmas. Overall, the findings of the study seem to suggest that (1) dilemmas that imply violation of social and moral norms might lead to more deontological choices in L1 and (2) dilemmas based on more realistic situation may elicit milder emotional reactions.
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