Does foreign language alter moral judgments? Inconsistent results from two pre-registered studies with the CNI model

Recent studies suggest that processing moral dilemmas in a foreign language instead of the native language increases the likelihood of moral judgments in line with the utilitarian principle. The goal of our research was to investigate the replicability and robustness of this moral foreign-language effect and to explore its underlying mechanisms by means of the CNI model—a multinomial model that allows to estimate the extent to which moral judgments are driven by people’s sensitivity to consequences (C-parameter), their sensitivity to norms (N-parameter), and their general preference for action or inaction (I-parameter). In two pre-registered studies, German participants provided moral judgments to dilemmas that were either presented in German or English. In Experiment 1, participants judged eight different dilemmas in four versions each (i.e., 32 dilemmas in total). In Experiment 2, participants judged four different dilemmas in one of the four versions (i.e., 4 dilemmas in total). Neither of the two studies replicated the moral foreign-language effect. Moreover, we also did not find reliable language effects on the three parameters of the CNI-model. We conclude that if there is a moral foreign-language effect, it must be quite small and/or very fragile and context specific

The truth revisited: Bayesian analysis of individual differencesin the truth effect

The repetition-induced truth effect refers to a phenomenon where people rate repeated statements as more likely true than novel statements. In this paper, we document qualitative individual differences in the effect. While the overwhelming majority of participants display the usual positive truth effect, a minority are the opposite—they reliably discount the validity of repeated statements, what we refer to as negative truth effect. We examine eight truth-effect data sets where individual-level data are curated. These sets are composed of 1105 individuals performing 38,904 judgments. Through Bayes factor model comparison, we show that reliable negative truth effects occur in five of the eight data sets. The negative truth effect is informative because it seems unreasonable that the mechanisms mediating the positive truth effect are the same that lead to a discounting of repeated statements’ validity. Moreover, the presence of qualitative differences motivates a different type of analysis of individual differences based on ordinal (i.e., Which sign does the effect have?) rather than metric measures. To our knowledge, this paper reports the first such reliable qualitative differences in a cognitive task

Die Wahrheitsillusion

Der Begriff Wahrheitsillusion (englisch: Truth Effect) bezeichnet das Phänomen, dass die Wiederholung einer Aussage zu einem Anstieg der beurteilten Glaubwürdigkeit der Aussage führt. Um zu verstehen, warum Menschen der Wahrheitsillusion unterliegen und unter welchen Umständen sie besonders anfällig für diese Täuschung sind, beschäftigt sich das vorliegende Buch mit den Mechanismen und Moderatoren der Wahrheitsillusion. Zu diesem Zweck wird dem Leser ein Überblick über die typischen Untersuchungsparadigmen, die gängigsten Erklärungsansätze und die einschlägigsten Befunde zur Wahrheitsillusion gegeben. Weiterhin werden die Ergebnisse eigener Experimente berichtet, die Antworten auf bislang ungeklärte Fragen zum Phänomen der Wahrheitsillusion liefern. Neben diesen neuen Befunden und ihren bedeutsamen theoretischen und praktischen Implikationen werden außerdem innovative Methoden zur Erforschung der Wahrheitsillusion vorgestellt