Past events: Susanne Brouwer. The Influence of Sub-Optimal Linguistic Contexts on Moral Decision Making

What:The influence of language on moral decision making

Where:  BCBL auditorium and BCBL zoom room 2. (If you would like to attend to this meeting reserve at info@bcbl.eu)

Who: Susanne Brouwer, PhD, Assistant professor, Centre for Language Studies and Department of Modern Languages and Cultures, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

When:  Thursday, October 20th at 2:30 PM

Moral decision making is an important aspect of social competence in humans, who make thousands of decisions every day. Living ethically entails that our daily habits and overall intentions must be aligned with a certain moral code. However, as strongly as a person may believe in a certain moral rule, previous research has shown that the linguistic context can induce different moral decisions. For example, bilinguals have shown to take different moral decisions in their native compared to their foreign language (Foreign Language Effect; Costa et al., 2014). In this talk, I will present a series of studies in which I investigated the impact of different linguistic contexts on moral decision making. More specifically, I examined how receiver limitations (i.e., being bilingual), contextual constraints (i.e., background noise) and sender limitations (i.e., accented speech) influence moral decision making. This work has important implications for our globalized society, given that many individuals (e.g., immigrants, bilinguals, multinational companies, universities) make moral decisions in these sub-optimal linguistic contexts.