Switching languages, changing minds: The role of language context in multilingual decision-making

Does the way we make decisions depend on the language we make them in? This question has been at the forefront of the investigation of multilingual cognition for the past decade or so.

The overall purpose of the current project is to extend the study of multilingualism and decision-making to a type of context that, ironically enough, has remained absent in research to date: multilingual communities.

Through a comprehensive programme of research spanning three years, we explore the dynamics and underlying mechanisms of decision-making in moral judgments, risk-taking, and health-related behaviours. We place the research in multilingual South Africa, a context we have researched for more than a decade.

For the purposes of the current project, the South African setting is ideal.

With its 12 official languages, South Africa is, from a legislative point of view, the most multilingual country in the world.

At the theoretical level, the project aims to test how current explanatory frameworks of the role of language in decision-making generalise to a context of societal multilingualism.

More generally, the results will inform our understanding of how individuals operate in an increasingly multilingual global linguistic market, where fast mobilization of populations and inter-continental cooperation on global issues like climate change and health make decision-making in multiple languages the norm rather than the exception.