讲外语能避免商业决策出昏招

    致各位首席执行官：当你的战略团队进行重大决策时，要求他们用外语来进行讨论。

    这是《认知》（Cognition）期刊2月号上一篇文章的结论。

    这篇文章的题目是《三思而行：外语对决策的影响》（'Piensa' twice: On the foreign language effect in decision making）。文章发现，当人们用非母语交谈时，他们做出的决定更符合逻辑，他们也会更少地受到情感倾向的影响。从某种意义上讲，这时他们更接近约翰•斯图尔特•米尔所说的理想型经济人。

    这篇文章的主笔之一、巴塞罗那庞培法布拉大学（Pompeu Fabra University）语言产生和双语研究小组负责人艾伯特•科斯塔说：“我们发现，几乎所有经济问题都掺杂了某种情绪。这时，直觉引导我们做出的决定并非上策，而说外语的人受到的影响则较小。”

    让科斯塔和他的同伴们想到从经济角度探索双语决策问题的是《心理科学》（Psychological Science）期刊2012年刊登的一篇文章，撰写这篇文章的是以芝加哥大学（University of Chicago）心理学教授博阿斯•凯萨尔为首的一批心理学家。

    这些心理学家在他们的研究中进行了一项名为《亚洲疾病问题》的“句子结构”测试。他们在这项测试中向懂两种语言的测试对象提出了两个问题。第一个问题是，你愿意开发药品A还是药品B：药品A在60万人中救活20万人的可能性为100%；药品B有33%的可能救活所有60万人，但一个人也救不活的可能性为66.6%。第二个问题是，你愿意开发药品A还是药品B：使用药品A，60万人中有40万人一定会死亡；使用药品B，60万人全都活下来的可能性为33%，全部死亡的可能性为66.6%。

    虽然这两个问题中的数字完全相同，但用母语进行测试时，测试对象在回答第一个问题时更多地选择了药品A，回答第二个问题时则更多地选择了药品B，原因是第二个问题的句子结构引起了测试对象的“厌恶损失”情绪。在这种情绪影响下，人们会冒更大的风险来避免损失，而不是争取收益。

    而用外语提出这两个问题时，测试对象的行为更符合逻辑，他们并没有因为句子结构而改变答案。

    科斯塔和他的团队在此基础上更进了一步。首先，他们用经济概念重复了这项测试（把“人”换成了“欧元”）。他们发现，用第二种语言提问时，受句子结构影响而改变答案的测试对象所占的比例从15%降到了6%。

    然后他们又进行了一项霍尔特-洛瑞测试，目的是考察人们在面临风险和不确定局面时，厌恶损失的情绪对他们进行经济决策的能力会造成什么样的影响。在这项测试中，他们请测试对象在10组彩票中进行选择，每组彩票有2种，中奖几率和金额不同（在第一组中，彩票A赢2美元的可能性是10%，赢1.60美元的可能性是90%；彩票B赢3.85美元的可能性是10%，赢0.1美元的可能性是90%；第二和第三组彩票赢得同样奖金的几率分别是20%和80%以及30%和70%，依次类推。）

    合理计算预期收益后，人们应该在前四组中选彩票A，在后六组中选彩票B。但测试对象一般都更多地选择了彩票A，因为他们“觉得”它更安全。至少，用母语进行测试时的结果是这样。用外语进行测试时，厌恶损失情绪的影响减少，测试对象更早地开始选择彩票B。

    Note to CEOs: When your strategy team is making a big decision, ask them to talk it over in their second language.

    That's the upshot of an article published in the February issue of the journal Cognition.

    The article, which was titled "'Piensa' twice: On the foreign language effect in decision making, found that when people use their non-native second language, the decisions they make are more logical and less affected by emotional biases. In a sense, they hew closer to John Stuart Mills' idealized homo economicus (economic man).

    "We found that in almost all economic problems that imply some kind of emotionality, in which intuition leads us to make decisions that aren't the best, people using a second language were less affected," said Albert Costa, one of the paper's lead authors and head of the Speech Production and Bilingualism group at Barcelona's Pompeu Fabra University.

    Costa and his cohort were inspired to look into the economic side of bilingual decision-making by a 2012 Psychological Science article by a group of psychologists led by Boaz Keysar of the University of Chicago.

    In that study, the authors used a "framing" test called the "Asian disease problem," in which bilingual subjects are asked two questions: First, whether they would develop Medicine A, which has a 100% chance to save 200,000 out of 600,000 people, or Medicine B, which has a 33% chance of saving all 600,000 people and a 66.6% chance of saving no one at all. Second, whether they would develop Medicine A, with which 400,000 of the 600,000 people will definitely die, or Medicine B, with which there is a 33.3% chance that no one will die and a 66.6% chance that all 600,000 will.

    Although the questions are statistically identical, subjects more often chose Medicine A in the first question and Medicine B in the second when they used their native language. That's because the framing of the question activates people's "loss aversion," an emotional bias that leads us to take more risks to avoid losses than to acquire gains.

    But when the subjects answered these questions in a second language, they did so more logically: They didn't change their answers based on how the question was framed.

    Costa and his team took this further. First, they repeated the "Asian disease problem" in economic terms (changing "lives" to "euros"). They found that in a second language, the number of people who changed their answer between frames fell from 15% to 6%.

    Then they ran a Holt-Laury Test, which examines how loss aversion affects our ability to make economic decisions under risk and uncertainty. In the test, subjects are asked to choose between two lotteries at 10 different odds (Lottery A, which offers a 1/10 chance to win $2.00 and 9/10 of $1.60, or Lottery B, which offers 1/10 of winning $3.85 and 9/10 of 10¢; the odds are then tilted to 2/10 and 8/10, 3/10 and 7/10, etc. until they are flipped).

    Figuring the expected payoff logically, one should choose Lottery A the first four times and Lottery B the last six. But people generally pick Lottery A several more times than they should because it "feels" safer. At least they do it that way in their native language. When Costa and his colleagues had participants use a second language, the emotional effect of "loss aversion" dropped and the subjects switched to Lottery B sooner.