决策判断中的外语效应研究综述

Literature Review of Foreign Language Effect in Judgment and Decision-Making

随着社会进步,教育水平提高,越来越多的人在母语基础上掌握了第二语言。而在使用非母语的时候,不同的语言是否会改变我们的思维,进而改变我们的决策与判断成为了近几年来的研究热点。有研究者发现,相对于使用母语,人们在使用外语思考时,确实会减少决策偏差的出现,因而这一现象被称为“外语效应”(Foreign Language Effect)。综合近几年来的研究,外语效应已被证明是稳定存在的,其研究范围已从最初的决策偏差领域扩展到道德决策等其他领域,其表现形式也更加丰富多样。虽然研究者们对外语效应的内部机制尚未达成共识,但目前主要存在两种解释:直觉加工被弱化和审慎加工被增强。本文旨在回顾总结前人研究成果,以期对外语效应深入了解,并对未来研究予以启示。

With the progress of society and the improvement of education, more and more people have mastered a second language on the basis of their mother tongue. In recent years, it has become a hot research topic whether different languages will change our thinking and then change our decision-making and judgment when using non-native languages. Researchers have found that people actually have less decision-making bias when thinking in a Foreign Language than in their native tongue, a phenomenon known as the “Foreign Language Effect”. Foreign language effect has been proved to exist stably, and its research scope has expanded from the initial field of decision bias to other fields such as moral decision making, and its manifestations have become more diversified. Although there is no consensus on the internal mechanism of the foreign language effect, there are two main explanations: the weakening of intuitive processing and the enhancement of deliberative processing. This paper reviewed the previous research results in order to gain a better understanding of the foreign language effect, and to shed light on future research.