Why We Aren't Quite the Same Person in Another Language

You live or travel in a language that isn't your own, and sometimes you feel you don't react quite the way you do at home. Three published studies help explain why: they look at decisions, moral judgments, and how the body responds to words that shock. You'll learn what they establish, what they leave open, and you can run a small test yourself in both of your languages.

This feeling of being "a little like someone else"

You may have noticed that you find it easier to say no in Spanish than in French, or that a criticism stings less in English than in the language of your childhood. Many bilinguals describe this sense of not being quite the same person from one language to another. Research can help clarify it, without confirming everything.

The idea that recurs across the three studies presented here comes down to one word: distance. According to the authors of a study on decisions, a foreign language can offer more distance because it is less anchored in the emotional system than a native language^[1]. This distance shows up in three areas: the choices we make, the moral judgments we form, and how strongly certain words affect us.

What this work does not show, however, is that you would change your personality by changing languages. We come back to this below.

Deciding in a Foreign Language: Choices Less Sensitive to Framing

Researchers Boaz Keysar, Sayuri Hayakawa, and Sun Gyu An, at the University of Chicago, tested whether people make the same decisions in their native language and in a foreign language. Their result goes against what one might expect: using a foreign language reduces certain decision biases^[1].

Consider the typical experiment. When a choice is presented in a native language, the same situation produces opposite preferences depending on whether it is described in terms of gains or losses: people avoid risk when lives saved are mentioned and seek risk when lives lost are mentioned. In a foreign language, however, participants were no longer influenced by this way of framing things^[1].

In the first experiment, 77% of participants who responded in English, their native language, preferred the safe option when it was described in terms of gains, versus 47% when it was described in terms of losses. This gap disappeared when the decision was made in Japanese^[1].

This effect is not tied to one particular pair of languages. It was observed with Korean as a native language, with Japanese, French, and Spanish as foreign languages, and with English as both a native and a foreign language^[1].

One might think participants were simply answering at random because they didn't understand well. A control experiment rules out this explanation: when the wording was changed so that the gamble had a higher expected value than the safe option, participants who read in Spanish chose the safe option far less often (14%), which shows they were reading and understanding the text^[1]. The authors conclude that the effect disappears even when people read and understand the text^[1].

Less Loss Aversion

Two other experiments address loss aversion, meaning the tendency to fear a loss more than one enjoys an equivalent gain. Presented in a foreign language, gambles with positive expected value were accepted more often, whether they were hypothetical or real^[1].

In the real-money version, participants received $15 in $1 bills and could, on each round, keep a dollar or risk it on a coin toss that could earn them $2.50, a positive expected value^[1]. Those who played in Spanish accepted 71% of the gambles, versus 54% for those who played in English, their native language^[1]. Participants kept the money they won, so the effect is not limited to choices on paper^[1].

Moral Dilemmas: A More "Utilitarian" Judgment

Should you sacrifice one man to save five? Whatever your answer, it shouldn't depend on the language the question is asked in, as long as you understand the problem. Yet that is what Costa and his colleagues' study, published in PLOS ONE, reports: people who use a foreign language make markedly more utilitarian decisions when faced with this kind of dilemma^[2].

The authors explain this result by the reduced emotional response a foreign language triggers, which lessens the weight of emotional intuitions^[2]. According to them, the effect persists even among participants whose results on a reflection test indicate very intuitive reasoning: the foreign-language effect there was 27 percentage points, nearly identical to the overall effect of 26 percentage points^[2].

The implications go beyond laboratory curiosity. For the authors, this shows that moral judgments can be strongly influenced by a property unrelated to moral principles, one that affects hundreds of millions of people every day^[2].

Words That Weigh Less: Taboos, Reproaches, and Emotional Distance

Many bilingual people report that it is easier to say certain emotionally charged words or expressions in a language that is not their native tongue^[3]. Catherine Harris, Ayşe Ayçiçeği, and Jean Berko Gleason set out to measure this feeling rather than rely on testimonies alone.

Their study involved 32 Turkish-English bilinguals. Participants rated words and expressions in Turkish, their native language, and then in English, their second language, while their skin conductance was measured at the fingertips^[3]. This measure tracks activation of the autonomic nervous system: skin conducts electricity slightly better when emotion rises, often without the person being fully aware of it.

The result: participants showed stronger activation to taboo words and childhood reproaches (“Shame on you!”) in their native language than in their second language^[3]. The authors see this as quantifiable support for the subjective experience reported by second-language speakers^[3].

The explanation lies partly in how we learn. Emotional expressions heard early in life, such as the reprimands young children receive, leave a stronger physiological imprint in the native language, whether or not the person is aware of it^[3]. The native language is also more often the language of emotional expression^[3].

The study of Turkish-English bilinguals points in the same direction: even with a good command of English, learned later in life, taboo words and childhood reproaches produced weaker physiological activation in their second language than in their native language^[3].

Switching Languages, Switching Personalities? What the Evidence Does Not Show

The results above might suggest that you truly become someone else. That is not what they show. They describe momentary reactions: a choice less influenced by framing, a more utilitarian moral judgment, a weaker skin response to certain words. None of these three studies measures personality.

It is also important to distinguish what belongs to the language itself, the culture associated with it, and the context in which you use it. The native language tends to be the language of emotional expressiveness^[3], and the second language the language of distance, but this is a tendency, not a rule. Whether you speak your adopted language at work, at the market, or with friends, it is not the same situation as a participant in an experiment.

What can be said without overreaching: the feeling of being “someone else” is real, and it aligns with effects measured in the lab on emotional distance. Whether it reflects a genuine change in personality, nothing proves.

Limits and Nuances to Keep in Mind

• The participants were mostly students, who had learned the foreign language mainly in the classroom, with no parent speaking it as a native language^[1]. The effects described apply to that profile, not necessarily to someone who has lived in a country for ten years.
• Their proficiency levels were intermediate: the average self-assessed English score of the Korean participants in one of the experiments was 4.4 out of 10^[1]. The more familiar a language becomes, the less one can expect a large gap.
• The measurements come from the lab: hypothetical choices, bets on small sums, skin conductance. They don't capture everything an expatriate lives through day to day.
• In the study on taboo words, .

Your Turn: Test It in Both Languages

You can observe for yourself what these studies measure in the lab. Set aside half an hour and have something to take notes with.

• Do the same exercise in each of your two languages: introduce yourself in three sentences, tell an embarrassing memory, politely decline a request, give someone a sincere compliment.
• After each exercise, note what changes: how easy it is to say things, the intensity you feel, your word choices, your hesitations.
• Repeat the exercise out loud, then in writing, to see whether the medium matters.
• Review your notes with the research findings in mind: greater distance in a foreign language, more emotion in your native language. Don't draw more conclusions than the studies support: your notes describe your own experience, not a rule that applies to everyone.