How language shapes us

Source: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/how-language-shapes-thought/4329212#transcript

Lera Boroditsky: In the 70s Noam Chomsky, a very important linguist, pioneered a theory, an idea that all human languages might actually underneath be essentially the same, that there might be a universal grammar that underlies all the 7,000 some languages that people speak around the world. Now this was proposed as a possibility, as a hypothetical idea, that there could be a formalism that describes all the languages and makes them underneath the same.
If you believe that idea, if you believe that hypothesis then asking how different languages shape the way we think is not a question that even makes sense because if all languages are really the same underneath then why would you even bother asking how a speaker of French as opposed to a speaker of Mandarin might think differently. The languages should all give people the same thoughts. But if it turns out that languages aren’t really psychologically the same underneath then that reopens the question and allows us to ask if you speak Spanish or if you speak Mandarin or if you speak Kuuk Thaayorre or Wik-Mungkan, do the structures of those languages, the habits in those languages actually shape the way you see the world?

Lynne Malcolm: One of the ways Lera Boroditsky has set out to test how language may shape our thoughts is by looking at how different language speakers think about the abstract concepts of time and space.
Lera Boroditsky: And it turns out that people around the world think about time in all kinds of cool and different ways depending on the patterns in their language and culture. So the first things we looked at are differences in metaphors people have for time. So for example in English we often use spatial terms like ahead, forward, behind, back to talk about time. So we’ll say the best is ahead of us, the worst is behind us. We’re treating time as if it were a horizontal path that we travel. But in other languages in addition to horizontal terms there are also vertical terms. So in Mandarin for example the words up and down are used to talk about time, the past is said to be up and the future is down. And we wondered, does this matter for how people lay out time in the privacy of their minds when they’re imagining the time line, when they’re thinking about arranging their schedule. Are Mandarin speakers more likely to imagine a vertical time line than are English speakers? And that turns out to be the case.
And there are other differences that I think are even more cool so Rafael Núñez and Eve Sweetser did some work with the Ymara. this is an Indian language. And the Ymara, instead of putting the future ahead and the past behind, the way we do in English, they do it in exactly the reverse direction. So for them the past is in front of them and the future is behind them. When they are talking about the past they will point ahead and when they’re talking about the future they’ll point behind them. And that seems incredibly counterintuitive to English speakers.


Lera Boroditsky: That’s an excellent question. There are different ways that languages influence us. Let me give you an example that I think has immediate real world consequences. Languages differ in how they describe causal events and let’s talk about accidents in particular. In English we don’t make a very strong distinction between an accidental event and an intentional event. So if I break a cup accidentally, or if I grab it in anger and smash in on the ground in both cases it’s fine to say 'she broke the cup'. But in some languages if it’s an accident you would use a different grammatical form, you would say 'the cup broke', or 'the cup broke itself', or 'to her it happened that the cup broke,' or something like that. So you would distinguish that event as being an accident in the grammatical form.
So one thing that we wondered was whether speakers who speak such languages that really more strongly distinguish accidents from intentional actions pay attention to events differently. So we compared the speakers of English, Spanish and Japanese. Spanish and Japanese of course are very different from one another but they both differ from English in that they differentiate accidents from intentional actions more strongly than English does. And what we did is we showed everyone videos of accidents and videos of intentional actions and they are simple actions like someone popped the balloon and it was either intentional or accidental.
We asked one group of people to describe the videos to make sure that the differences between languages were real, and they were. And we asked another group of people just to watch the videos and try to remember them and later we tested their memory. What we found in the descriptions was English speakers were much more likely to mention the agent when describing an accident than were speakers of Japanese of Spanish. So if someone accidently popped the balloon English speakers would still say he popped the balloon whereas speakers of Spanish or Japanese might not mention the agent.
When we looked at the memory results we saw a pattern that mirrored the language data. So what we saw is the English speakers remembered really well when someone intentionally popped the balloon, and they also remembered really well, equally well when someone accidently popped the balloon, it didn’t matter to them whether the action was intentional or accidental, they remembered who did it. For Spanish and Japanese speakers they remembered who did it really well when it was an intentional action but less well when it was an accident. So when it was an accident if they were describing it they weren't likely to mention the agent and they also weren’t paying attention to who the person was as much, they were distributing their attention elsewhere..
So that to me is an example of a cross-linguistic difference with important real world consequences. Of course we want to think about how we blame people, how we distribute punishment, how we participate in eye witness testimony and what kinds of elements of our culture or our language are contributing to our judgments. To what extent do we maybe judge people too harshly because of the structure of our language or to what extent do other people maybe avoid responsibility because of the structure of their language and so on. There are no right answers to these questions but they lead us to think about how we come to make these important judgments about other people.


Lynne Malcolm: And it even seems that the extent to which we blame others for their actions can come down to the language used. Do you remember the scandalous incident between Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson?
Lera Boroditsky: So we used the original wardrobe malfunction, this is when Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson performed at the Superbowl half-time show and there was an incident where Janet Jackson’s breast became exposed. Now everyone in the United States has seen this video and there was a lot of outrage about it at the time. And so what we wanted to see is whether describing this situation in slightly different ways would lead people to blame Justin Timberlake more or less for the event and want to fine him more or less money. So we made everyone watch the video again and we gave them either a agentive description or we said in the final dance move he reached across her body and he ripped the costume, or in the final dance move he reached across her body and the costume ripped. And of course everyone saw exactly what happened, so they saw the actual visual reality but what we found was that the people who got the agentive description not only blamed Justin Timberlake more they also wanted to charge him 53% more in fines, and that was something in the order of $36,000 more in terms of what people wanted from him as a punitive fine. And we thought that was a really expensive agentive expression.
Lynne Malcolm: Absolutely.
Lera Boroditsky: Just one transitive verb costs you thousands of dollars. That’s one of my favourite recent examples where a small change in phrasing can lead to a big difference in people’s judgments.


Lynne Malcolm: The other structure that you talk about is the use of metaphor. How powerful are metaphors and how do they figure in the way we reason?
Lera Boroditsky: Metaphors are a wonderful tool and a dangerous tool for thinking. So I think about metaphor a lot in the context of reasoning about social issues or political issues. How does a regular person think about how to deal with a societal problem like diminishing crime, or bettering the economy, or decreasing unemployment? How do we think about these really complex systems? One way we do it is by employing metaphors. Metaphors invite us to think about these complex or abstract things in terms of things that we already know something about. So you might say crime is a beast attacking our cities. Well we know something about beasts and we know something about what it means for a beast to attack, and all of a sudden you have all of this conceptual structure, all of this knowledge that you already have in your mind that you can apply to think about crime. And this can lead you then to make decisions and reason along the lines of that metaphor and come to a conclusion about how crime should be dealt with. But of course we have not one metaphor but many metaphors for any given abstract idea, so we talk about crime as a beast attacking but also as a virus infecting, or plaguing our cities. And it turns out that depending on which metaphor you choose you end up thinking that very different kinds of solutions would be effective in addressing the problem of crime.
So if we give people an example where we say crime is a virus ravaging the city, they propose that what should be done is we should investigate the root of the problems and we should essentially do things to inoculate the city against further infection, so they say you should improve the education system, or you should work on unemployment. These are very systemic, reform oriented solutions. But if we tell people crime is a beast ravaging the city and give them all the same statistics and numbers as before they now instead say what you need to do is you need to make more jails and you need to put out more police officers and give harsher sentences and more punishment. So they give enforcement and punishment solutions that are more in line with how you would deal with a beast.
And in our studies we found that these metaphors can be surprisingly powerful. So a single word difference in a description of a city's crime problem can lead to a difference in opinion between people that’s at least as big as the difference in opinion between Democrats and Republicans for example in US politics, which is a very big, ecologically big difference.