Most people who speak more than one language have noticed that they feel subtly different depending on which language they are using. Warmer in their native tongue, more precise in a second. More emotional at home, more clinical in a professional context. What they tend not to realise is that this difference is not just a feeling — it is measurably changing the quality and character of the decisions they make.

The Foreign Language Effect

In 2012, psychologist Boaz Keysar and colleagues at the University of Chicago ran six experiments across three continents with over 600 participants speaking five different languages: English, Korean, French, Spanish, and Japanese. Their finding was counterintuitive and robust: people make systematically different decisions depending on whether the problem is presented in their native language or a foreign one. Loss aversion — one of the most reliably documented biases in decision psychology, where losses feel roughly twice as heavy as equivalent gains — was significantly reduced when participants reasoned in a foreign tongue.

In one of the clearest experiments, native English speakers who had learned Spanish in a classroom setting were given $15 in real dollar bills and asked to take a series of bets. Each bet offered a coin toss: win $1.50 or lose $1. Statistically, taking every bet was the rational choice. When thinking in English, participants took the bet only 54% of the time — loss aversion making them irrationally cautious. When thinking in Spanish, they took it 71% of the time. The language of deliberation, not the mathematics of the bet, was driving the decision.

The effect held whether the money was real or hypothetical. The same pattern emerged across all five language pairs tested. This is not a small or fragile finding.

Why it happens

The proposed mechanism is emotional distancing. Native language words are acquired early in life and embedded in emotional memory through years of lived experience. Hearing a negative outcome described in your first language activates a richer affective response than the same description in a foreign one. A second language is typically processed less automatically than a native tongue — the additional cognitive effort shifts processing away from the fast, emotionally-driven System 1 responses and toward slower, more deliberate System 2 analysis.

The framing effect — where the same outcome produces different choices depending on whether it is described as a gain or a loss — largely disappeared when decision problems were presented in a foreign language. People who were risk-averse for gains and risk-seeking for losses in their native tongue showed neither bias when working in a second language. The emotional signal that normally drives the asymmetry was dampened enough that the analytical signal could operate more cleanly.

What this means for decisions that are hardest to make

The moral dimension of the foreign language effect is where the commercial implications get most interesting. A 2014 PLOS ONE study found that bilinguals made substantially more utilitarian decisions when facing moral dilemmas in a foreign language — the rate of utilitarian choices increased from 20% to 33% when participants shifted from their native tongue to a second language. A 57-study systematic review confirmed the pattern holds across populations, though it is strongest at intermediate proficiency levels rather than among highly fluent bilinguals for whom the second language has become nearly as automatic as the first.

For entrepreneurs, this translates directly: the decisions that are hardest to make emotionally in a native language — closing a department, ending a partnership, discontinuing a product that you built — may be more available to clear-eyed analysis in a foreign one. The emotional weight that makes those conversations feel almost physically difficult in Spanish or Mandarin is genuinely reduced when the same deliberation happens in English. Not because the English analysis is better, but because the emotional architecture of the native language is doing less interference work.

This is not a recommendation to make all hard decisions in a foreign language. There are boundary conditions the research is clear about, and some decisions benefit from full emotional engagement. The point is that bilingual entrepreneurs are not making equivalent decisions in their two languages — they are running different cognitive processes on the same problem and potentially arriving at different conclusions without realising it.

When the effect is a liability

The same emotional dampening that reduces bias in financial decisions creates problems in relational ones. Psychologists working with bilingual patients specifically advise conducting emotionally significant conversations — serious medical discussions, trauma processing, genuine vulnerability — in the native language. The emotional register that the foreign language flattens is not always an obstacle to clear thinking. Sometimes it is the source of the insight.

The bilingual entrepreneur pitching to investors needs to feel the passion they are trying to communicate. The team leader reading a difficult conversation with a struggling employee needs full emotional access to what is being said. The founder navigating a relationship with a long-term client needs the warmth and depth that only the emotionally unreduced native language delivers. In these contexts, the foreign language’s analytical clarity is a liability, not an asset.

Language as cultural frame activation

Beyond the emotional distancing mechanism, the language used for a decision activates its associated cultural architecture. Switching from Mandarin to English is not just a phonological shift — it is moving between the long-term orientation, collectivist, high-context frame that Mandarin carries and the shorter-term, individualist, lower-context frame that English activates. The entrepreneur who analyses a partnership in Mandarin is applying a different strategic lens to the same numbers than the one who analyses it in English, because the concepts that each language makes most cognitively available differ.

Concepts like guanxi — relationship capital — are not absent from English strategic thinking, but they are imported categories requiring conscious effort rather than the default frame. In Mandarin, they are the water the thinking swims in. This is the cognitive accessibility version of linguistic relativity: not that language determines thought, but that it shapes what is easiest to think, and easy-to-think shapes what actually gets considered.

The practical implication

The bilingual entrepreneur who has been operating across two linguistic contexts for years has likely developed an intuitive feel for which language produces which kind of thinking — even if they have never named it. What the research adds is precision: the foreign language is systematically reducing emotional bias and activating more analytical processing; the native language is providing fuller emotional access and culturally embedded strategic framing. Both are valuable. Neither is universally better. The cognitive advantage is in knowing which is operating.

Book worth reading on this

Through the Language Glass by Guy Deutscher is the most rigorously honest treatment available of what language actually does and does not do to thought. Deutscher is careful — more careful than most popular treatments of this topic — to distinguish between what the evidence genuinely supports about linguistic relativity and what is mythology. He takes seriously both the limits of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and the genuine findings about how the categories a language makes available shape what its speakers find easy to notice and easy to think. For any bilingual entrepreneur who has sensed that their thinking shifts between languages and wants to understand what is actually happening rather than what popular intuition suggests, this is the book that handles the question with the precision it deserves. It is also a genuinely enjoyable read — Deutscher writes about linguistics the way the best science writers handle physics, making technical questions feel urgent and accessible without simplifying them into falsehood.

If the dynamics described here are significantly affecting your wellbeing, speaking with a psychologist is the right next step. UK: Samaritans (116 123, free, 24/7). Mind (0300 123 3393). BACP: bacp.co.uk/search/Therapists. Crisis Text Line — text HOME to 741741 (US, UK, Canada, Ireland). International: internationaltherapistdirectory.com.