Out of curiosity, just checked the referenced paper[1] and there is no Korean/Japanese/French version of the questionnaire they used.
It's disappointing. We all know these kinds of polls can be easily gamed by subtle (or not-so-subtle) phrasing, and without the questions actually used, I have no way of knowing if the "Foreign Language Effect" actually exists or if their choice of words in the translation affected the outcome.
Psychology studies are (in my general opinion) notoriously poor science to the point that the vast majority of them are worthless fluff useful only for sensational headlines.
As someone with personal experience inside academic psychology and academic computer science, it's my impression that psychology is far stronger as a field, having a much more rigorous community dedicated to scientific truth, and exhaustive standards of review and experimental design.
But, I'm sure that your general opinion is well-informed as well, or you wouldn't make such strong claims about a very broad field. What's your background in psychology, and what makes you say the things you do about it?
This point is critical. A study can have a good methodology. But if nobody tries to replicate it, you have no chance of finding out that you are missing something critical. And with something as complex as people, "missing something critical" is something that we need to figure out.
And this isn't exactly a new problem for psychology. Feynman somewhat famously questioned a lot of classic research with http://neurotheory.columbia.edu/~ken/cargo_cult.html. I say somewhat famously because people in areas like physics have all read that essay. But in my experience psychologists are a little less inclined to read the criticism.
But with psychology it is even worse. We lump people together by symptom, not by root cause. It is like lumping together people with migraines, head injuries, and caffeine headaches together. Then you find out that coffee beats a placebo for helping headaches, and give them all coffee!
You think I'm exaggerating? Read http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-dia... for verification that the NIH considers it a high priority research item to come up with classifications based on root causes, so that we have a chance of even being able to do useful research!
Yes, psychology has a lot of well-meaning people, and they stumble across a lot of interesting stuff. But it should be read with a critical eye, because the field as a whole does not perform reliably enough to compel our trust.
> But with psychology it is even worse. We lump people together by symptom, not by root cause. It is like lumping together people with migraines, head injuries, and caffeine headaches together. Then you find out that coffee beats a placebo for helping headaches, and give them all coffee!
This happens (in medicine, not just psychology), and there's definitely room for hypothetical improvement. But in many cases, it's hard to blame people, because there's no way to do better without doing an unknown but gargantuan amount of research. For example, lupus is (or was when I had the discussion with my mother) defined as exhibiting X of a list of Y symptoms, where Y > X. This leads to situations like the following:
1. You, the patient, present with X-1 symptoms of lupus. By definition, you don't have lupus, and treatment for lupus is not warranted.
2. Time passes.
3. You, the patient, come back to your doctor with one additional symptom of lupus. Medical doctrine now states that you have lupus (not so interesting) and that, more interestingly, those X-1 earlier symptoms are symptoms of lupus (which you didn't have when you developed those symptoms), not of some other yet-undiagnosed problem. You can now be treated for lupus.
Obviously, that satisfies no one and is crying out for a more "reality-based" definition. The problem is that no one has a candidate for the actual physical causes of lupus. The best anyone's ever been able to do is recognize that the same set of treatments are broadly effective against a constellation of symptoms, which may seem to be related to each other or not, but which co-occur to some degree in people who respond to these treatments.
Of course it's a high priority to learn what the root causes of symptoms are, but that doesn't mean it's easy or even, in the general case, possible. You have to start somewhere.
Oh no, I'm well aware of those -- but academic computer science is even worse! It's very new to have artifact evaluation at all, meaning almost any published result that represents an evaluation of a system (as opposed to something purely theoretical) is probably bunk. Almost no academic systems are released publicly for evaluation, so reproduction isn't just something that should be done, but isn't -- it's entirely impossible.
This is basically the same as publishing a psych paper with a Methods section including a line that says "and then magic occurs". It's like an unsafe cast in a programming language -- you totally escape the guarantees provided by the wider structure of the academic system.
Academia in general has serious problems. There's a fundamental problem of incentive, and until that's solved, nothing's really going to change. But psychology is definitely unfairly maligned.
(It doesn't help that plenty of people doing doing what's almost psuedoscience are still harbored in a lot of psych departments, but their methods are still more rigorous than HCI research in most cases.)
>But, I'm sure that your general opinion is well-informed as well, or you wouldn't make such strong claims about a very broad field.
I don't believe you are being genuine here at all. This passive-aggressive, sarcastic response is not appreciated. If you don't like what I wrote, respond directly and honestly.
Psychology isn't really comparable to computer science since computer science is the study of a manmade system, making it more like mathematics. Computer science is not a traditional "science" studying the mechanisms of an unknown phenomenon, so concepts like "experimental design" aren't easily mappable.
Theoretical computer science is much like mathematics. But virtually no other area in computer science is, even slightly.
If you look at computer science papers in machine learning, systems, human-computer interaction, networking, robotics, or architecture, you'll almost always see an experiment of some sort. These are typically benchmarks, but there are plenty of other examples of empiricism in computer science.
But the experiments in computer science are horribly designed! They lack almost any control, and use statistical methods that would make psychologists wince. Hypothesis testing is rare to the point of nonexistance. (Psychology sometimes adjusts too far in the other direction, using complex analyses where a simpler one would do.)
Further, experiments are nearly never replicable, at all, because the systems evaluated are never made public, or the experimental environment is never recorded. For a great treatment of this trend in systems, see http://www-plan.cs.colorado.edu/diwan/asplos09.pdf. Pointing out a systematic artifact in that many experimental designs would be career-making in psychology, or any other science! But you can look at modern papers and see exactly the same mistake being made.
Still, I would advice not to disregard this study completely and at least be careful about making decisions when using a foreign language. It well might be true that the emotional and other subsystems are somewhat inhibited when thinking in a foreign language and that might have both positive and negative consequences.
Being careful with what you speak and write is naturally good advice. A worthless scientific article doesn't make the opposite of it's conclusion true.
For what it is worth, I have anecdotal evidence that thinking in a foreign language in fact does somewhat inhibit emotional and experiential (common sense) subsystems. So beware.
It's also not inconsistent that being forced to work through a "bullshit" question in a foreign language makes it more likely that the "bullshit" with be self evident. If you think of how a "con" artist works, it's by manipulating your confidence. In a "foreign" language you are lacking this confidence and thus less subject to manipulation. That being said, this is not evidence that the field of Psychology itself is not primarily bullshit. Because the latter is typically propogated in our native language ;D.
Well, actually more than how you put it, its actually the language people use INSIDE OF THEIR BRAIN that matters.
An average person, talks to himself multiple times in a day, evaluating decisions, simulating how things are/should be, thinking about course of action etc etc.
This is done in a language, which often ends up as mother tongue to the outside world.
But the missing link here is the mental stamina. The brain has a native locale language, but if the information is coming in any other language, which needs to be understood (decoded) first into the locale language, it consumes stamina & time.
But in the case of it being actually in the language in brain's native language, less time & stamina would be consumed in the same conversation, and more time and stamina would be left for actual thinking/analysis/evaluation/etc.. leading to better understanding between people.
> An average person, talks to himself multiple times in a day, evaluating decisions, simulating how things are/should be, thinking about course of action etc etc.
beefsack's comment and yours are surprising. I thought it was fairly intuitive notion, and generally accepted that language provides the basic concept and structure for thoughts. Basically the Saphir-Whorf theory [1]. There surely must be a base layer that doesn't rely on language, but anything most of the time we are handling higher level problems.
This is a theory, but most bi/tri-langual people I talked to experienced some kind of shift in their way of modeling their thought, sometimes relying on a concept only existing in a specific language (that's what makes the reliance on the language obvious).
Yes, it is strange. I am a native German speaker, but my thoughts are strongly dependent on what I am thinking about. As I am reading most of the CS or philosophy books in English they are naturally thought of in English. Family and so on in German. And everything about daily life in Turkish (as I am living right now in Istanbul). On the other hand when I read a French novel my mind is switching completely back to French. Despite the fact that I am aware there should be a layer closer to the metal or irrespective the brain tissue, I can't really think of it without relying well on a language.
Nearly all thought processes deal in abstract concepts directly without being wrapped in language. Language is a transport mechanism for sharing these abstract concepts from one one brain to another, not for processing in the mind.
The idea that there is a "mother tongue" of your thoughts is a common misconception. You can consciously think about speech and language, but it's an exception to how your brain usually operates.
It's worth noting here that they demonstrated this effect with language learners i.e. it's very likely that the students had to labouriously work out the foreign language questions.
Basically they've demonstrated that if people spend a lot more time on a question they answer less emotionally (which seems like it would be true independent of the language).
If they can demonstrate the effect still holds with 2nd language speakers with native level proficiency then this would be a lot more interesting result.
Just an anecdote, I speak French with native proficiency and while I can see the emotional detachment in languages as English, in French it is certainly not there. So I think it also depends on language immersion.
It's the same thing with foreign units of measurement (in, ft, F, stones, etc.).
Although I know there is a one-to-one mapping between meters and feet, I only grok a measurement given in meters.
There's probably some conditioning behind this: every day you are reminded that a pack of salami is 200g, while a pack of flour is 1kg, and so on ... so that for each measurement you just access your library of memories that relate the number to some previous experience.
Since a similar dictionary does not exist for the foreign units you learned in an artificial setting, and since your brain does not auto-update all your past memories based on the new info that 1m=3+3/8ft, you are left with words that are all understanding and no emotion.
Some imperial measurements are pretty random (1 mile = 1720 yards, 1 yard = 3 feet?), but many of the commonly used ones are just based on fractions or convenient values instead of everything being base 10.
Maybe this will help with the fluids. Looking at a table of fluid measurements, it is easy to see it is just a base 2 system.
2^-1 oz = .5 oz = 1 tablespoon
2^0 oz = 1 oz = 1 oz (2 tablespoons)
2^1 oz = 2 oz = 1/4 cup (4 tablespoons)
2^2 oz = 4 oz = 1/2 cup (8 tablespoons)
2^3 oz = 8 oz = 1 cup (16 tablespoons)
2^4 oz = 16 oz = 1 pint (2 cups)
2^5 oz = 32 oz = 1 quart (4 cups)
2^6 oz = 62 oz = 1/2 gallon (8 cups)
2^7 oz = 128oz = 1 gallon (16 cups)
I think it is quite beautiful in a way. That doesn't explain why we have 12 oz beers though.
Coming from a country that uses litres and millilitres, European centilitre paper cups just look plain weird. It's certainly the most appropriate unit for the task, but I'm just not used to it.
My own mapping is between meters and yards, and slightly overstates the metric distance. Since it comes from distances of races--200 m, 400 m, etc., is is only so usable for smaller measures.
The problem is that in the example given, the two problems framed in term of loss and in term of gain are not equivalent.
Depending on how much time the student has to consider the question, he might not see from:
- If you choose Medicine A, 400,000 people will die. If you choose Medicine B, there is a 33.3% chance that no one will die and a 66.6% chance that 600,000 will die.
That in the case of medecine B, there's a 66% that the result (600,000 people dying) is equivalent to the result of not taking any medicine.
Whereas when the problem is framed in term of gain, it's quite clear by the phrasing "66.6% chance that no one will be saved.".
That's the problem with this kind of questionnaire, and it's compounded by the fact that they do not provide the Korean/Japanese/French version of the questionnaire they used.
Not really relevant to the point of the article, but worth mentioning:
The article's commentary on the _Asian Disease_ problem which states "the number of certain deaths is the same in both versions of the problem.." is incorrect. In case A, the number of certain deaths is 400,000, in case B it's 0.
As I understand it, there is not enough information to determine the expected number of deaths. In the first situation, the expected number of deaths of choosing medicine A must be greater than or equal to 400k and in the second situation (again choosing medicine A) the expected number of deaths must be less than or equal to 400k.
My interpretation was that in the first situation, there is a possibility that everyone dies if you choose medicine A, therefore B was the right choice. Similarly, in the second situation, there is a possibility that everyone lives if you choose medicine A, therefore A was the right choice. Maybe I'm misunderstanding but there does not appear to be enough information in the question to determine the exact probabilities.
A: 100% probability of 200k cures; expected value = 200k survivors
B: 1/3 probability of 600k cures, 2/3 probability of 0 cures; expected value = 200k survivors
Of course, as software writers, we have probably been trained to analyze algorithms for expected performance and for the best and worst cases. Real-time programmers should always choose option A, as it has the best worst-case performance. Some programmers will choose A because it has lower computational complexity. Others will choose option B because it has better best-case performance, and in the worst case is no worse than doing nothing at all.
The scenario is supposed to be mathematically ambiguous, but the people who designed it obviously did not consider factors beyond just the average case and whether the numbers are framed positively or negatively.
Medicine A will always save 200,000 people, with 400,000 dying.
Medicine B will save all 600,000 people 33.3% of the time, but everyone will die 66% of the time.
The expected number of deaths (the 'expected value' in game theory) is the same for both cases (200,000). Medicine A is easy to calculate (200,000 * 1.00 = 200,000). For Medicine B, the calculation is 600,000 * 0.33 + 0 * 0.66 = 200,000.
The idea is that the average number of deaths is the same for both cases; you are just trading the certainty of Medicine A (where you know you will save exactly 200,000) vs the chance to save everyone, but the risk of losing everyone.
The word "all" as a modifier to 600k is not in the text;
see for eg:
And here is the problem framed in terms of gains:
If you choose Medicine A, 200,000 people will be saved. If you choose Medicine B, there is a 33.3% chance that 600,000 people will be saved and a 66.6% chance that no one will be saved.
Which medicine do you choose?
Although the number of certain deaths is the same in both versions of the problem, people take the safer option
The lack of scale prevents an analysis of proportionality.
For example:
600k out of 500,000,000?
or
600k out of 1,000,000 or 1,000,000,000?
Given the downsides are equal, the omission begs the qeustion about the rate of success. The rate of success is not a trivial source of people's bias, because empirically "non-success" is often accompanied by adverse effects (a/k/a side effects) as well as additional cost. The result is a leading question. In other words, the language is manipulative.
But do we really need this study to tell us this? C'mon, that is stupid. And has nothing to do with Mandela.
The "Asian Disease problem" is a very standard experimental psychology/economics problem. It's alternatively phrased as this: "Would you like receive 4 dollars, or would you like a 40% chance to receive 10 dollars?"
The entire article is just a layer over this showing the supposed effects of asking the question in a foreign language (other comments have explained the likely problems of the experiment), and then another layer over that wrapping it in "this is totally relevant to you because Madiba".
I mean, yeah. Mandela was right. But not because of the foreign language effect.
> It's alternatively phrased as this: "Would you like receive 4 dollars, or would you like a 40% chance to receive 10 dollars?"
The problem is that the rational answer to this depends on a huge amount of background information, eg, the value of certainly having some money, versus the benefit of the additional money.
It's less of a problem when the effect is well known to hold in a variety of phrasings. It doesn't matter if it's people or dollars; it doesn't matter if it's 4 out of 10 or 8 out of 10.
Further, they account for stuff like that by using large sample sizes. Different people are choosing both options. It's just that the proportions hold despite this.
They've spent a good 30 years confirming this. If you really want to criticize it, it'd be worth putting together a list of studies investigating this and analyzing their methodologies for problems.
I understand that the wording and the numbers chosen by the experimenters are intended to create two equivelent sitations, but the fact is, they do not. The sentence:
"If you choose Medicine A, 400,000 people will die."
Tells you that 400k people will die if you choose medicine A. It says nothing about what will happen to the remaining 200k. I believe it is illogical to assume that the sentence implies the remaining 200k live. Note that if you were to ask me in real life, I'd probably be happy to make that assumption but that doesn't change the fact that it is an assumption based on missing information.
I understand your point in terms of formal logic (that saying 400k people will die does not necessitate that the other 200k can't also die). However, the initial sentence that starts the experiment is "Recently, a dangerous new disease has been going around. Without medicine, 600,000 people will die from it. In order to save these people, two types of medicine are being made."
When you follow that by saying "If you choose Medicine A, 400,000 people will die", it is not illogical to assume that they don't mean "oh yeah, the other 200k will also die, too" This isn't a Mitch Hedberg joke.
In these scenarios, we are expected to make many basic assumptions that aren't included in the scenario. We are safe to assume that there isn't an unmentioned side effect of Medicine B that will leave everyone paralyzed, or that Medicine A won't turn the survivors into zombies.
Are you referring to this?
"I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to, too." (It's a lot funnier when delivered with good timing than when you read it.)
His comedy was very hit-and-miss, but some of it was spectacularly funny.
Ok, I finally see my mistake. It was skipping over the line "without medicine, 600k people will die from [the disease]" which allows us to account for the remaining 200k.
Assuming vampires and zombies are not involved, life and death are binary states. No one who is living has died, and no one who has died remains living. If 400k people die [from the hypothetical disease], then 200k people will survive [to eventually die from some other cause].
I'm sure this form of problem analysis gives psychological experimenters fits.
You're reading it incorrectly. It's saying that the number of certain deaths is the same, whether it's phrased as "400,000 deaths" or "saving 200,000 people".
The way I read it was that "both versions" refers to the two tellings of the problem, one in terms of deaths the other in terms of survivors, not the two different medicines.
So just extrapolating on this example - would the best results in any negotiations be achieved when both parties speak a language that is foreign to both of them? In that case both are taking more rational decisions, ignoring the emotional "burden" than their native language puts on them.
As a non-native English speaking person who uses English daily basis, losing emotional burden seems one (possibly) positive side effect of a second language, whereas there probably are many negative ones for the decision making. In my experience, reduced working memory seems one important negative outcome of second language, which significantly affects problem solving. More chance of misunderstanding sometimes precludes good decision making. These negative aspects would be able to offset the benefit discussed here.
for a completely different reason I would say yes. For lack of fine vocabulary to convey subtle things, I guess it's harder to spin things in a certain way, more basic word->more basic meaning and less implied thing.
As someone who has been living as an immigrant for past two and a half years, I can only agree to this. Getting emotional distance from a problem comes easy for me, if I'm thinking about it in English (its not my native language).
On the other hand, getting into relationships can be quite difficult. Its not so easy to get emotionally involved with someone that doesn't speak your language. Not sure if the language is the problem though, or maybe just cultural differences.
Irresepctive of the language, what's scary is how many people would accept high chance (2/3) of total extinction for relatively slight chance (1/3) of total success. It gets extra scary when you consider that politicians are presumably thinking this way about war, including nuclear war.
Freeman Dyson: "I changed my mind about an important historical question: did the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki bring World War Two to an end? Until this year I used to say, perhaps. Now, because of new facts, I say no. This question is important, because the myth of the nuclear bombs bringing the war to an end is widely believed. To demolish this myth may be a useful first step toward ridding the world of nuclear weapons."
It's certainly possible that this research shows correlation between less emotional thinking and language use, but it seems to me like Mandela's quote in the article is really a reframing of Goethe's observation that "The border of our world is the border of our language." It's no different really than the Romans and various "barbarian" tribes exchanging youth to grow up in each other's culture - know your "enemy," speak his language, etc. That explains more about Mandela's cognizant motivations in this case, though the vignette makes for a nice article.
The example they used basically paints taking more risk as 'cooler, more rational option' which seems a bit odd to me. Humans are well known not to have a linear utility function for a lot of things (loss aversion) because doing so can be useful and can be argued as rational - especially when applied to money for instance, people will trade off higher average returns for lower risk which probably makes sense for survival. It's like saying a greater amount of change, or a greater amount of risk, is strictly better, whereas in any given situation it may be better or may be worse.
Unfortunately others listening in their language implies you speaking in their language.
To gain a benefit from this scenario, you would need to prove that "learning a language for X years" increases the chances of "listener response is more emotional".
This, however, is much more unlikely since accent and language proficiency come into play.
So no HN-style hack yourself goal can be derived (which I kinda hoped to find here)
"engaging in a foreign language increases psychological distance and promotes deliberation"
Wasn't Latin a great invention? It was foreign to everybody (I mean after the fall of Rome) - looks like ideal for a language of diplomacy and science.
I know this is not really the point of the article, but what language other than Afrikaans could Mandela and de Klerk have used? Xosha? I doubt de Klerk knew more than a few words of it at the time. Neither of the two spoke English natively.
The double entendre of "goes to his head" in that quotation is pretty amazing — it has both descriptive meaning as something of which intellectualizing occurs and also contrasts the heart and the ego, suggesting that the ego sits in the intellect.
Very good.
What I'm getting at here is that this idea of Mandela's also applies to samewise monolingual speakers — as we each have our own idiolect, so far as descriptivist linguists are concerned.
The trouble with that -- besides the obvious downside of letting abusive users dictate the terms of service for everyone else -- is that we'd lose the ability to hear from people involved with new products or emergent events that are being discussed for the first time. Those stories are supposed to be the key drivers of HN. Some of the more interesting comments are from brand-new accounts.
Umkhonto we Sizwe did go to hell after he was imprisoned and become a terrorist organization, but it's hard to blame someone locked up in prison for that. I don't see any standard by which you could claim Mandela was a terrorist, which wouldn't also sweep up some of America's founders.
Mandela was no Gandhi, no saint. He resorted to discriminate violence when otherwise thwarted in fighting against injustice. But given them sum of his life I would aspire to be as humane a person as he was.
Release that anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. Suffering leads to dark side. Dark side has cookies. Cookies lead to weight gain. Weight gain leads to unhappiness.
Therefore anger leads to unhappiness. Trust me I'm a doctor[0].
Mandela was a radical communist who committed 156 acts of terrorism and never denounced violence. The economy and currency of South Africa crashed under Mandela. Unemployment went up and income went down. Apartheid was a terrible system but more people have been murdered every year since Mandela's presidency than before. There's more but you get the idea.
It's disappointing. We all know these kinds of polls can be easily gamed by subtle (or not-so-subtle) phrasing, and without the questions actually used, I have no way of knowing if the "Foreign Language Effect" actually exists or if their choice of words in the translation affected the outcome.
[1] http://psychology.uchicago.edu/people/faculty/foreignLanguae...