Articles and Stories

August 20, 2014

This is just one variation of a puzzle that has had moral philosophers baffled for ages. The puzzle goes like this:

There are 5 men tied to a railroad track and a train is coming that will certainly kill all of them. You are standing on a footbridge over the track looking down at this impending disaster. Next to you is a fat man who, if pushed off the footbridge, will fall on to the track and, although be killed by the train, save the other five men. Would you push the fat man off the footbridge to save the other men?

There are many variations of this dilemma, but the interesting thing is what was discovered by Albert Costa of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Spain and published in the journal PLOS ONE.

He and his colleagues found that the answers people gave in a study, depended quite dramatically on whether they were presented the dilemma in their native language or their second language, which they reported a 3 out of 5 on fluency. The subjects who were asked the question in their native language would push the fat man, killing him, 20% of the time. The subjects who were asked in their second language would kill the fat man 33% of the time.

This has broad implications as it was determined that when analyzing a problem in a non-native language, we seem to engage a cooler, more distanced method of decision making. We spend more brain power and reason more carefully. This could impact medical and legal decision making as well as global initiatives. For example, UN meetings are conducted in languages that are not the native language of most of the participants. Many international business are making English their internal language.

Although this could mean more careful and analytical decision making on global issues, it could be bad news if you are the fat man on the footbridge!

This blog is a summary of the article “Gained in Translation” published in the Economist, May 17th 2014.