If you’re bilingual, moral choices can often feel more urgent and emotionally charged in one language yet distant and rational in another. This raises an intriguing question: does language merely shape how we express our thoughts, or can it also influence what we judge to be right or wrong?

Our research team has explored this question, looking not just at how moral decision-making is influenced by the language a person uses, but also by their underlying cognitive and emotional abilities.

By examining factors such as working memory and emotional intelligence along with language background, our research moves beyond the idea of a simplistic “foreign language effect” and offers a more nuanced picture of how bilingual minds navigate the balance between emotion and cognition when facing moral dilemmas.

Moral decisions are rarely the result of cold calculation alone. When people confront dilemmas such as whether to harm one person to save several others, their judgements emerge from an interplay between deliberate reasoning and immediate emotional reactions. Feelings like guilt, empathy or aversion to harm are not side effects of moral thinking; they actively guide it, often pushing us toward choices that feel “right” rather than simply logical.

This emotional component has played a central role in research on bilingual moral decision-making. Several studies have reported that people tend to arrive at more utilitarian solutions when reasoning in a second language rather than in their mother tongue.

This phenomenon, known as the moral foreign language effect, has often been seen as a consequence of emotional detachment: using a less emotionally........

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