Less Superstitious in Another Language

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

A new study suggests that reading information in a foreign language can suppress common superstitious beliefs about that information. Researchers from three European universities had people read imaginary scenarios either in their native language or in a foreign one, and they were asked to imagine doing a particular action, like submitting a job application or taking an exam under circumstances that might lend themselves to being superstitious.

For example, they were asked questions involving bad luck, like this one. Imagine that you have an important exam and you feel nervous. Before you enter the university building, you accidentally walked under a ladder. How would you feel about taking the exam? Or, for example, you might go to an airport and you’re about to take off and then you realize it’s Friday the 13th. How does that make you feel?

Or in the case of a good luck scenario, one of their questions was, imagine that you have an important job interview and you feel really nervous. But before the interview, you try to relax at a park and you find a four-leaf clover in the grass. How do you feel going into the job interview?

And what was really interesting, Grant, was that overall the researchers found that when people read about those scenarios in a foreign language, they felt less negative about the bad luck scenarios and they felt less positive about the good luck scenarios. So in other words, it appears that reading about either potential good luck or bad luck situations in a foreign language actually suppressed those superstitious feelings.

So their subjects were at least bilingual, and so they asked them first in their native tongue and then in their acquired language. Yes, and this was a written questionnaire, and it was also people who learned the language in a classroom, the foreign language in a classroom.

So do they have any theories on why it’s like this? Yeah, they think that superstitions tend to be acquired early in life, just like your native language tends to be acquired early in life. And you pick up those beliefs when you’re young. And so reading in your native language evokes those beliefs in a way that reading in a foreign language that you learn later on doesn’t.

And I don’t really know what to make of this study, although it’s part of a body of research now where people are more willing to talk about something embarrassing for a longer period of time if they’re talking in a foreign language. And people are more willing to swear in a foreign language than their native language.

That’s interesting. So there’s something here about the trappings of a word that go beyond just basic meaning. So the word as a sound structure in the mind and the mouth has attachments to it. Right, right. Associative memory, in other words.

That’s right. I remember that the one time that I had couples therapy in Spanish, I was so much more expressive. It was a really great session because I was speaking in Spanish with more primary colors and less nuance. And I highly recommend trying therapy in a foreign language.

And if you’re not fluent in that foreign language, you might not have the subtlety where you can kind of get these, have these second and third kind of currents of meaning underneath what you’re saying. Exactly. You’re kind of stuck with one meaning. Exactly. It was a great exercise for me.

So where was this? It’s called Breaking Magic, Foreign Language Suppresses Superstition, and it’s in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. So we’ll post a link to more information about that on the website.

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