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Language, Morals, and Perception Introduction : What are morals? According to the Dictionary from “Oxford Languages” morals are “a person’s standards of behavior or beliefs concerning what is and is not acceptable for them to do.” The origins of morals date back to early human societies, where they relied on morality for cooperation to have more likely chances of surviving, since it’s easier to survive when it’s not just you, but other people with you working towards survival. This is why there’s laws that tell the people what is right and what is wrong. Without them society wouldn’t progress and not nearly as much would get done. Morals are necessary and important in human society, and they are not something that should be looked over. Further along the line, when more complex societies came into fruition, philosophers like Plato or Aristotle went further down the hole of the importance of thinking about morals and developing ones that benefited oneself. Plato states that morality is about wisdom, seeking what good is, living in harmony with your soul, and living earnestly with your soul. He thought that if everyone lived this way, society would be good and fair. Now, it wasn’t just about surviving, but also thriving, how society can be its best self, how people can be their happiest self, how to learn acceptance, self-control, discipline, all things that today are necessary for a person to function properly. Many philosophers that are popular even thousands of years after their death because of their wisdom, shared their methods of thriving and how important morals were when it came to thriving. Not only that, but morality showed up in religion as well, across everywhere. From christianity to islam to hinduism, there are things that are stated clearly good and bad in each. Murder being bad, or stealing, or lying, or adultery. Giving to people in need, respecting loved ones, being honest, and having good intentions towards people. Billions of people have adopted these ideas, and they influenced how they live their lives. Whatever it is, it is true across the board that morality has had a big part throughout human history. From survival, to thriving, to religion. When people think of what makes their morals, they think of a variety of things. First, how they grew up, who they grew up with, their life experiences, their culture. Person 1 can grow up around an empathetic family, and they might give others more patience because that’s what they think is right. Person 2 might grow up with a family that doesn’t have the same empathy as person 1, and as a result don’t give people as much patience as them. Person 1 grew up in a Christian Family, and believes it’s not right to curse or to lie. Person 2 grew up in a family that wasn’t as religious, and so as a result doesn’t view lying as serious as person 1 does. The environment we are in, the people we are around, those are factors that play into what makes morals. Now when people think of what could change those values, they probably think of meeting new people, maturing, or maybe new experiences. Tony recently lost someone important to him, and as opposed to before when he would skip on family hangouts to get some extra work done at his job, now he values time with his family more than work. Things almost everyone agrees on that have a big impact on people’s lives. Now what about perception? Perception and morals go hand in hand. The way one perceives things is the way they will decide what is right or wrong. According to Oxford Languages, perception is “a way of regarding, understanding, or interpreting something; a mental impression.” Perception is affected by the same things that morals are affected by; experiences, people, biology, etc. And while it is true those things can influence one’s morals and one’s perceptions, something we don’t consider too much when it comes to changing them is language. Language heavily influences oneself, both when it comes to how people feel about moral situations, and people’s perceptions. Claim 1 : Language can heavily affect morals by changing how people feel about moral situations. A study at the University of Chicago and Pompeu Fabra University did involving the trolley problem. It involved whether a person would push someone heavy off a bridge to stop a trolley to save 5 people aboard. The researchers found that when native Spanish speakers faced this dilemma in English, people were more likely to “respond with a utilitarian approach” even though it involved them having to physically push a man to save the collective group of people. This was also true for native English speakers when they were faced with this dilemma in spanish. This study showed that people judge based on their emotions less in a foreign language, since they were more sure of pushing a man off a cliff when the situation was told in a foreign language. This is important because it shows the vast effect language has on one’s morals, to the point where they can change. The experiences, people, culture, all these things that make your morals; not only those things can make them, but so can the simple change of a language. This isn’t the only study exploring this concept. In a study conducted by the Journal of Experimental social psychology, the researchers conducted 3 individual studies on how morals are affected by language. The first study presented native italian and german speakers to 4 scenarios; a owner eating their dog after it got into a car crash because he was curious of what dogs tasted like, incest, a student copying another student in an exam in which no one gets caught, and finally, a woman who finds a national flag in her closet, cuts it up into pieces, and uses the pieces to clean the toilet. In this first study, the results found that there was a significant effect language had on how wrong the participants thought the moral situations were. The scenarios were judged less harshly in the foreign language, which was English, than in the native language. The bar graph of the study can be viewed below, the independent variable being the scenario, and the dependent variable being how wrong the people being surveyed viewed each scenario. One can conclude from this study that emotions play less of a part in judgments when the judgments are made from a situation told in a foreign language, proving that language can change how harshly people feel about situations. This is very important because these studies really bring up the question on why this is the case, how does a change in language really make someone think more utilitarian. Is this change positive or negative? I believe that this change is a positive one, as it is derived less from personal biases or emotions, which can sway someone’s opinion. A possible reason for this is that since using another language the brain has to work harder to process the information, there is less emotional involvement. Claim 2: Language also heavily influences perception. A hypothesis that explores the effect language has on perception is the Sapir Whorf hypothesis. This hypothesis states that people have less or more of an understanding of the world based on their language. This would be because some languages don’t have specific words to describe things, whether it’s describing color, space, or time. The article “How The Age of Language Acquisition Relates to Creativity” by Leera Boroditsky states that “the languages we speak affect our perceptions of the world. People from different cultures have different mental experiences. They have a different perception of the world: physical characteristics of space and time, the events and their sequences.” In this case, we’ll focus on color. An example of this would be the ‘russian blue’ study in which researchers in 2007 examined how language affected one’s perception of colors. “Russian speakers have two words for blue—goluboy (light blues) and siniy (dark blues)– whereas English speakers have only one. English and Russian speakers were tested on speeded color discrimination tasks. The Russian speakers fared quite better than their English-speaking counterparts. The results seem to suggest that language does have a notable influence on a person’s perception, at least in the objective recognition of colors.” Some languages have multiple words for one thing. Hypothetically, according to this study, having more words for a certain thing gives a better understanding of the thing. Since the Russian language had two words for blue, they did better on discriminating colors from one another, as opposed to english speakers who only have one. This is also observed when it comes to different languages describing snow. In English, the only word for snow is ‘snow’. However, for the Inuit, an indigenous tribe in the arctic and subarctic regions of north america, there are multiple words for snow, for snow that is wet, for snow that is clinging, etc. Therefore, the innuit have a better understanding of snow because of the many words they use for snow, compared to english since they only have one word for it. This is the case for many other languages as well that put importance on certain things, like Arabic, which has multiple words for camels and stages for love. This reflects what this language puts importance on. It also allows for more of a fine distinction between these stages of love or these types of camels then lets say english which only has one word for a camel, probably because most if not all english speaking countries don’t have many camels in their society. Language does not only influence perception, but is also a reflection of the values or norms of the societies that use them to an extent. It goes hand in hand with culture, which does the same thing. Counter Argument Some people might say how linguistic relativity, also known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, is not agreed upon by many philosophers. To this I say that while the strong version of this hypothesis is not agreed to be true, which is that language determines thought, it is agreed upon by many philosophers that language does have an influence on how people think. And this influence is shown through the various languages and the various words that are used for certain things or the lack of words for certain things. Some people would say that language isn’t as strong of a factor when influencing people’s morals as say, experiences, culture, or people that you grow up with. To this I say that I agree with that, and while that is true, my point isn’t trying to prove that language is a stronger influencer in morals than these things, but that it does have an effect, and the effect is stronger than is thought, as shown through the trolley experiment. And the same is true for perception. While the influence culture has on morals is greater than the influence language has on it, there is evidence that language has an influence, as show through the Russian blue experiment. Another counter argument that could be made is that culture more specifically is a stronger influencer of morals. I would agree with this as well, but to say language isn’t close to being as strong of a factor would be incorrect. Language and culture are intertwined, and so to say that language doesn’t come close to having the impact culture has on perception and morals would be wrong because one doesn’t go without the other. As stated with the Inuit example, language can have a lot of words for something, therefore signifying that there is more of an importance put on certain words, and that there is a better understanding of certain things due to the amount of words that can be used in a language to describe something. Whether it’s a type of snow, or a type of action, or a type of belief. Conclusion In conclusion, language plays an undeniable and underrated role for influencing our morals and perception. And it goes past that as well. Language shapes a lot of things, such as our decisions, how we understand things, etc. While culture, our experiences, and the people we are surrounded by have a more major role in these things, language has a stronger impact than people think, and everyone should be more mindful in how they use that language. Language is more important now than ever. The internet connects people from thousands of miles away, and lets them communicate with each other, post mostly whatever they want, and more. Machine translation is a thing now, where you don’t even have to speak the same language to communicate with one another. As this communication reaches more and more people in a way it couldn’t before, language will have a stronger effect on people and even society than the effect that it’s already had for people today. Works Cited Florey, Chelsea. “Using a Foreign Language Changes Moral Decisions.” University of Chicago News, 16 Dec. 2016 Barrett, Lisa Feldman, et al. “The Influence of Language on Moral Judgment.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization Kostandyan, Aram E., and Y. A. Ledovaya. “How the Age of Language Acquisition Relates to Creativity.” Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences Keysar, Boaz, et al. “The Foreign-Language Effect: Thinking in a Foreign Tongue Reduces Decision Biases.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America Stolberg, Shira. “How ‘Snow Words’ Started a Linguistic Kerfuffle.” The Christian Science Monitor […] “Language, Morals, and Perception”

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25 Mar In the Details: Karl Haendel & Mitch Epstein

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Kevin Moore talks to Artist Karl Haendel and photographer Mitch Epstein. Haendel invests meaning in slow drawing as a form of homage to the social and spiritual work of his subjects. (14:02) Epstein captures the beauty and terror of the world in photographs rich in political import.

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In the Details: Karl Haendel & Mitch Epstein

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