洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee) 4d ago

Fascinating paper: Your Morals Depend on Language (Costa et al., 2014). People make significantly more utilitarian choices in moral dilemmas when the dilemma is presented in a foreign language, apparently because a foreign language dulls emotional responses and shifts the balance toward deliberative thinking.

It matches my own experience. Thinking in a foreign language feels like rendering graphics without GPU acceleration: everything runs on raw CPU, slower and more laborious. After a full day of conversations in English or Japanese, I'm physically exhausted in a way that Korean never does to me. What I didn't quite register until reading this paper is that the “GPU” doing all that fast, effortless processing is largely the emotional system. When it steps back, you end up doing more of the reasoning yourself. Whether that's a feature or a bug probably depends on what you're deciding.

Show threadSomē4d ago
@hongminhee "Thinking in a foreign language feels like rendering graphics without GPU acceleration" is such a good way to put it!
Show thread洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee) 
@some Thank you! It's actually a metaphor that came to me when I first learned about System 1 vs. System 2 thinking. A foreign language seems to throttle the GPU, which forces more work onto the CPU, and it turns out a lot of that “GPU work” is the emotional system quietly pre-computing your judgments for you.
Daniel Kahneman Explains The Machinery of Thought

Daniel Kahneman dissects the machinery of thought into two agents, system 1 and system two, which respectively produce fast and slow thinking.

Farnam Street
Mar 18 at 12:28pmWeb
Show threadSomē4d ago
@hongminhee seeing this made me think of my own personal experience learning languages as an enthusiast but also as in immigrant. I find that getting emotional in a foreign language, forces the processing from the CPU to the GPU. Nothing sensible will come out, but with 'driver updates', the GPU learns it. 😄 I think this also supports the claim why it's easier to learn curse words than others.
Show thread洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee) 4d ago
@some Ha, that's a great extension of the metaphor. Emotional experiences as driver updates; it makes sense that curse words install so fast, they basically come bundled with the driver package. 😂