{"id":642970,"date":"2013-02-19T16:07:38","date_gmt":"2013-02-19T21:07:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.ted.com\/?p=69774"},"modified":"2013-02-19T16:10:43","modified_gmt":"2013-02-19T21:10:43","slug":"5-examples-of-how-the-languages-we-speak-can-affect-the-way-we-think","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/642970","title":{"rendered":"5 examples of how the languages we speak can affect the way we think"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"language\"Economist Keith Chen starts today\u2019s talk<\/a> with an observation: to say, \u201cThis is my uncle,\u201d in Chinese, you have no choice but to encode more information about said uncle. The language requires that you denote the side the uncle is on, whether he\u2019s related by marriage or birth and, if it\u2019s your father\u2019s brother, whether he\u2019s older or younger.<\/p>\n

\"KeithKeith Chen: Could your language affect your ability to save money?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cAll of this information is obligatory. Chinese doesn\u2019t let me ignore it,\u201d says Chen. \u201cIn fact, if I want to speak correctly, Chinese forces me to constantly think about it.”<\/p>\n

This got Chen wondering: Is there a connection between language and how we think and behave? In particular, Chen wanted to know: does our language affect our economic decisions?<\/p>\n

Chen designed a study — which he describes in detail in this blog post<\/a> — to look at how language might affect individual\u2019s ability to save for the future. According to his results, it does — big time.<\/p>\n

While \u201cfutured languages,\u201d like English, distinguish between the past, present and future, \u201cfutureless languages,\u201d like Chinese, use the same phrasing to describe the events of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Using vast inventories of data and meticulous analysis, Chen found that huge economic differences accompany this linguistic discrepancy. Futureless language speakers are 30 percent more likely to report having saved in any given year than futured language speakers. (This amounts to 25 percent more savings by retirement, if income is held constant.) Chen\u2019s explanation: When we speak about the future as more distinct from the present, it feels more distant — and we\u2019re less motivated to save money now in favor of monetary comfort years down the line.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s only the beginning. There\u2019s a wide field of research on the link between language and both psychology and behavior. Here, a few fascinating examples:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Navigation and Pormpuraawans<\/b><\/b>
    \nIn Pormpuraaw, an Australian Aboriginal community, you wouldn\u2019t refer to an object as on your \u201cleft\u201d or \u201cright,\u201d but rather as \u201cnortheast\u201d or \u201csouthwest,\u201d     writes Stanford psychology professor Lera Boroditsky (and an expert in linguistic-cultural connections) in the Wall Street Journal<\/i><\/a>. About a third of the world\u2019s languages discuss space in these kinds of absolute terms rather than the relative ones we use in English, according to Boroditsky. \u201cAs a result of this constant linguistic training,\u201d she writes, \u201cspeakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes.\u201d On a research trip to Australia, Boroditsky and her colleague found that Pormpuraawans, who speak Kuuk Thaayorre, not only knew instinctively in which direction they were facing, but also always arranged pictures in a temporal progression from east to west.
    \n.<\/span><\/li>\n
  2. Blame and English Speakers
    \n<\/strong><\/strong>In the same article, Boroditsky notes that in English, we\u2019ll often say that someone broke a vase even if it was an accident, but Spanish and Japanese speakers tend to say that the vase broke itself. Boroditsky describes a study by her student Caitlin Fausey in which English speakers were much more likely to remember who accidentally popped balloons, broke eggs, or spilled drinks in a video than Spanish or Japanese speakers. (Guilt alert!) Not only that, but there\u2019s a correlation between a focus on agents in English and our criminal-justice bent toward punishing transgressors rather than restituting victims, Boroditsky argues.
    \n.<\/span><\/li>\n
  3. Color among Zu\u00f1i and Russian Speakers
    \n<\/strong><\/strong>Our ability to distinguish between colors follows the terms in which we describe them, as Chen notes in the academic paper in which he presents his research (forthcoming in the American Economic Review<\/i>; PDF     here<\/a>). A 1954 study found that Zu\u00f1i speakers, who don\u2019t differentiate between orange and yellow, have trouble telling them apart. Russian speakers, on the other hand, have separate words for light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy). According to a 2007 study, they\u2019re better than English speakers at picking out blues close to the goluboy\/siniy threshold.
    \n.<\/span><\/li>\n
  4. Gender in Finnish and Hebrew
    \n<\/b><\/b>In Hebrew, gender markers are all over the place, whereas Finnish doesn\u2019t mark gender at all, Boroditsky writes in Scientific American <\/i>(    PDF<\/a>). A study done in the 1980s<\/a> found that, yup, thought follows suit: kids who spoke Hebrew knew their own genders a year earlier than those who grew up speaking Finnish. (Speakers of English, in which gender referents fall in the middle, were in between on that timeline, too.)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Economist Keith Chen starts today\u2019s talk with an observation: to say, \u201cThis is my uncle,\u201d in Chinese, you have no choice but to encode more information about said uncle. The language requires that you denote the side the uncle is on, whether he\u2019s related by marriage or birth and, if it\u2019s your father\u2019s brother, whether […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7342,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-642970","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642970","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7342"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=642970"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642970\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=642970"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=642970"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=642970"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}