Parochial Altruism and the Foreign Language Effect: An Experimental Investigation

In an increasingly multilingual world, understanding whether judgments vary as a function of language is an important topic. The idea that a non-native language may affect the cognitive processes responsible for judgment and decision-making has received significant attention from psycholinguistic research. The effect, known as the foreign-language effect (FLE) has been extended to moral judgments and several studies have shown that when presented with moral dilemmas people tend to be more inclined towards sacrificial harm when the dilemmas are presented in the foreign than in the native language. In addition, recent data collected at the University of Padova have shown that the FLE is present in four of the five moral foundations as measured by the Moral Foundation Questionnarie developed within the Moral Foundation Theory. Of particular interest to the present study is the finding that individuals tend to score higher on the in-group foundation when using their foreign language. According to this finding, people tend to value loyalty to the group more in their foreign language in comparison to their native language. Importantly, a separate line of research has shown that identification with the in-group correlates with higher levels of parochial altruism. Parochial altruism refers to the propensity to direct prosocial behavior towards members of one’s own in-group. The aim of the present study is to test whether the FLE found in measures of the in-group foundation extends to a tendency to direct altruism parochially. In other words, we are interested in understanding how altruistic attitudes and behaviors in a bilingual population vary as a function of language. We aim to do so by employing an experimental design in which Italian-English bilingual participants are given the chance to donate money to either one of two charities. The two charities presented differ in the inclusiveness of their scope (i.e., one operates on the local (provincial) and the other on the national level). Participants are randomly assigned to one of two language condition, so that the questionnaire would be presented either in Italian or in English. After collecting some personal data, participants are told that they will be given an extra-amount of money for their participation to the experiment. They could decide to donate or not, all or a part, of the sum they will receive. They are also told that the sum they will donate will be doubled by the experimenter and given to the charity they opted for. Data will be collected from about 400 participants. According to the aforementioned theoretical framework, we expect a difference in the propensity to donate and in the amount of the donation, according to the language used, in particular when the donation is in favour of the local community.