Think Carefully… But in a Different Language
We make thousands of decisions everyday. In fact, researchers at Cornell University estimate that we make about 226.7 decisions regarding food alone. However, some decisions might hold more significance than others – you might put more thought into selecting a house to buy than choosing a pair of shoes to wear to the supermarket (or maybe not). It is likely that the consequences of these big decisions make us want to think rationally, to make careful choices.
This isn’t always easy to do because of the myriad of cognitive biases that unconsciously influence the many decisions that we make daily. Language plays an important role in determining how strongly these biases affect our cognition, and this is evident in how even the language that we think in impacts our decision-making. While we might assume that individuals would make the same decisions regardless of what language they use, research shows that thinking in a foreign language can reduce cognitive biases and encourage deliberation.
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