The Moral Foreign Language Effect (MFLE) is characterized by increased utilitarian decision-making when bilinguals respond to moral dilemmas in their foreign language. While previous research has given us a better understanding of this phenomenon, few studies have investigated how foreign language experience influences the MFLE. The present study investigated whether differences in foreign language proficiency, immersion, or dominance modulated the emergence of the MFLE. Mandarin–English bilingual young adults responded to a series of moral dilemmas in either their native or foreign language. Participants also provided ratings of permissibility and distress after reading each dilemma. We report a dilemma-specific MFLE that was modulated by differences in foreign language experience. Most significant was the observation that separable dimensions of foreign language experience interact when modulating the MFLE in a manner that is dilemma-specific. These findings emphasize the importance of considering differences in foreign language experience across multiple dimensions when investigating the MFLE.

We investigated whether the personal importance of objects influences utilitarian decision-making in which damaging property is necessary to produce an overall positive outcome. In Experiment 1, participants judged saving five objects by destroying a sixth object to be less acceptable when the action required destroying the sixth object directly (rather than as a side-effect) and the objects were personally important (rather than unimportant). In Experiment 2, we demonstrated that utilitarian judgments were not influenced by the objects’ monetary worth. Together these findings suggest that personal importance underlies people’s sensitivity to damaging property as a means for utilitarian gains.

In considering moral dilemmas, people often judge the acceptability of exchanging individuals’ interests, rights, and even lives. Here we investigate the related, but often overlooked, question of how people decide who to sacrifice in a moral dilemma. In three experiments (total N = 558), we provide evidence that these decisions often depend on the feeling that certain people are fungible and interchangeable with one another, and that one factor that leads people to be viewed this way is shared nationality. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants read vignettes in which three individuals’ lives could be saved by sacrificing another person. When the individuals were characterized by their nationalities, participants chose to save the three endangered people by sacrificing someone who shared their nationality, rather than sacrificing someone from a different nationality. Participants do not show similar preferences, though, when individuals were characterized by their age or month of birth. In Experiment 3, we replicated the effect of nationality on participant’s decisions about who to sacrifice, and also found that they did not show a comparable preference in a closely matched vignette in which lives were not exchanged. This suggests that the effect of nationality on decisions of who to sacrifice may be specific to judgments about exchanges of lives.

The expression of emotion can play a significant role in strategic decision-making. In this study, we hypothesized that emotion expression alters behavior in morally charged negotiation. We investigated the impact of facial displays of discrete emotions, specifically anger and sadness, in a morally charged multi-issue negotiation task. Our results indicate that if a negotiator associated moral significance to the object of the negotiation, displays of anger resulted in reduced concession making whereas displays of sadness increased concession making. Moral significance of the issues fostered an emotional matching mechanism of sorrow, where a sorrow expression from one party elicited a sorrow expression from the other. Taken together, the results indicate that emotional expressions can affect morally charged negotiation in ways that can inhibit as well as promote cooperation.

The moral foreign language effect (MFLE) describes how people’s decisions may change when a moral dilemma is presented in either their native (NL) or foreign language (FL). Growing attention is being directed to unpacking what aspects of bilingualism may influence the MFLE, though with mixed or inconclusive results. The current study aims to bridge this gap by adopting a conceptualization of bilingualism that frames this construct as a composite and continuous measure. In a between-group analysis, we asked 196 Italian–English bilinguals to perform a moral dilemmas task in either their NL (i.e., Italian) or FL (i.e., English). In a within-group analysis, we evaluated the effects of FL age of acquisition, FL proficiency, and language dominance – all measured as continuous variables – on moral decision-making. Overall, findings indicate that differences within bilinguals’ language experience impact moral decisions in an FL. However, the effect of the linguistic factors considered was not ubiquitous across dilemmas, and not always emerged into a MFLE. In light of these results, our study addresses the importance of treating bilingualism as multidimensional, rather than a unitary variable. It also discusses the need to reconceptualize the FLE and its implications on moral decision-making.

In the stream of flurry of publications grappling different paradigms to tackle underlying mechanisms of moral decision-making, EVENT RELATED POTENtial (ERP) studies is beginning to explore psychophysiological components in the moral domain, focused on observing various moral behaviors in the experimental situations. This research was aimed at providing a new method of study investigating neural correlates of subjective moral decision-making in which we hypothesize that the social congruent or in-congruent context, could emerge a salience brain response in intuitive or cognitive control related responses toward moral dilemmas. Electrophysiological data were recorded from the scalp a 32-channel recording system complying with the international 10–20 system. The average N2 (175–300 ms) and LPP (300–600 ms) amplitude and latency were measured after the onset of putative counterpart response. Repeated measure ANOVA revealed that there was a difference between congruent versus in-congruent social response to high conflict scenarios in LPP amplitude in right lateral and frontal electrodes F(4, 174) = 5.812, P < 0.001 (Fig. 1). The findings also, suggest that N2 latency in less conflict moral scenarios may appear earlier compared with high conflict moral scenarios during in congruent social response in frontal electrodes especially left area F(3, 174) = 3.013, P < 0.05 (Fig. 2, figures are not available for this abstract). In conclusion, these results were either extend previous neurophysiological findings on classic moral scenarios and consistent with the notion that right hemisphere would be much more representative of cognitive control process during high conflict moral decision-making, while left frontal electrodes engaged in early intuitive process.

When people must either save a greater number of people from a smaller harm or a smaller number from a greater harm, do their choices reflect a reasonable moral outlook? We pursue this question with the help of an experiment. In our experiment, two-fifths of subjects employ a similarity heuristic. When alternatives appear dissimilar in terms of the number saved but similar in terms of the magnitude of harm prevented, this heuristic mandates saving the greater number. In our experiment, this leads to choices that are inconsistent with all standard theories of justice. We argue that this demonstrates the untrustworthiness of distributive judgements in cases that elicit similarity-based choice.