Sorry, this project has finished.

Please contact 2148972s@student.gla.ac.uk with any questions about this study.

Thank you for taking the time to participate in the study! The purpose of this research is to investigate the influence of empathy in bilinguals on decision-making, whereby people appear to make less emotional, and more logical decisions in their second language compared to a native one.

The vignette you were asked to read investigated the ‘optimality bias,’ which has been shown to influence moral judgements. According to this bias, people are more likely to blame actors in situations where a suboptimal decision was made, even when it is made clear to them that the individual had no knowledge of such probabilities.

Participants are given either a Dutch or English version of the vignette. Each participant is given only one version of the vignette to read and evaluate. The evaluations are then compared between participants who read it in their first language (Dutch) and those in their second language (English).

The study included two further conditions. One condition involved prompting participants to take the perspective of the doctor, whilst the other did not prompt participants to do this. In both conditions, the suboptimal condition was the result, and the outcome was that the patient suffers hearing loss regardless of their treatment.

We are investigating whether participants have less empathy in their foreign language and therefore lead to an increasing of this bias, and our prediction is that those performing the task in their second language will show increased blame judgements because of a decreased amount of empathy.

If you have any further questions or comments regarding this study, please feel free to contact the researchers:

Tom Smits - 2148972s@student.gla.ac.uk Wil Toivo - Wilhelmiina.Toivo@glasgow.ac.uk