Work

What goes around comes around: Foreign language use increases immanent justice thinking

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: Immanent justice thinking refers to the tendency to perceive causal connections between an agent's bad (good) deeds and subsequent bad (good) outcomes, even when such connections are rationally implausible. We asked bilinguals to read scenarios written either in their native language or in a foreign language and examined how language influences immanent justice endorsements. In five pre-registered, randomized experiments involving 1875 participants from two bilingual populations, we demonstrate that foreign language use increases immanent justice endorsements. This effect was largely unrelated to foreign language proficiency, emerged only for problems that could trigger immanent justice intuitions, and was eliminated by a prompt to think rationally. These results suggest that using a foreign language increases immanent justice endorsements by reducing awareness of the conflict between intuition and rational reasoning.

Source: Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2025.104747

Authors: Janet Geipel, Constantinos Hadjichristidis, Luca Surian

Institutions: University of Exeter, University of Trento

Language: English

Topic: Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment

Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience

Field: Neuroscience

Domain: Life Sciences

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $3,220

Funder: Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Università e della Ricerca