Change languages, shift responses
The language we speak may influence not only our thoughts, but our implicit preferences as well. That’s the finding of a study by Harvard psychologists, who found that bilingual individuals’ opinions of different ethnic groups were affected by the language in which they took a test probing their biases and predilections. “Charlemagne is reputed to have said that to speak another language is to possess another soul,” said the paper’s co-author, Oludamini Ogunnaike, a Harvard graduate student. “This study suggests that language is much more than a medium for expressing thoughts and feelings. Our work hints that language creates and shapes our thoughts and feelings as well.” Implicit attitudes, positive or negative associations that people may be unaware that they possess, have been shown to predict behavior toward members of social groups. Recent research has shown that these attitudes are quite malleable, susceptible to factors such as the weather, popular culture, or,...