Recycling in Babel: The Impact of Foreign Languages in Rule Learning.

ABSTRACT: Environmental decisions and prosocial behaviors have been shown to be emotionally mediated, and language is at the core of emotions. The language context can alter the way decisions are made, and using a foreign language tends to favor an analytic approach to the decision and reduce its emotional resonance. In the present work, we explored whether or not the strategic use of a native vs. a non-native language could alter the learning of rules that are at the basis of our environmental behavior. To test this, elementary school students carried out a series of tasks that required recycling the employed materials at the end of the session. Children had to put each kind of material used in the corresponding container following basic association rules, resembling the process that they would do

SUBMITTER: Anton E 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7311970 | biostudies-literature | 2020 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature