In another study, when bilinguals were confronted with a moral dilemma, it was noted that the participants were more likely to choose the utilitarian option of maximizing benefit for the majority (Costa, Foucart, Hayakawa, Aparici & Apesteguia, 2014). This highlights that using a foreign language affects moral judgement.

Similar to risk-taking, this might be due to the use of a foreign language inhibiting emotional processing. People are more utilitarian in their foreign tongue because they feel less, not because they feel more (Hayakawa et al., 2017). Another possibility would be that more cognitive effort is needed when using a foreign language, resulting in the person slowing down to think more deliberatively, therefore more rationally.
Although rational decision-making in terms of loss aversion and moral judgment has been shown in bilinguals with foreign language, it has not been widely observed in bilinguals with a second language that is not considered foreign. These people are typically early bilinguals who are frequently exposed to both languages since childhood (De Houwer, 1995). Thus, the current study aims to test whether FLE applies to early bilinguals, and how language dominance might affect.

Methodology

I intend to obtain quantitative data through an online questionnaire distributed to target participants. The target participants are 18-year-old English-Chinese speakers of NUS High School. Participants will be randomly assigned to a risk-taking situation or a moral dilemma through the questionnaire in either English or Mandarin Chinese. They will then have to make a decision by choosing from a list of possible choices of action, which will be translated into numbers for quantification. Once completed, the participants’ language proficiencies will be assessed using the Bilingual Language Profile (BLP; Birdsong et al., 2012).

Questionnaires are useful as they reduce biasness that may arise if the questions were asked in-person. This is because unwanted factors such as the way or tone of questioning may influence the participants’ choices. Online questionnaires provide anonymity, which encourages the participants to answer truthfully as they do not have to worry about being judge for their opinions. The quantified data will also allow easy collation and comparison