Saturday, June 28, 2008

Switching Languages May = Switching Personalities

Fascinating study:
People who are bicultural and speak two languages may actually shift their personalities when they switch from one language to another, according to new research. . . .

The authors studied groups of Hispanic women, all of whom were bilingual, but with varying degrees of cultural identification. They found significant levels of "frame-shifting" (changes in self perception) in bicultural participants--those who participate in both Latino and Anglo culture. . . .

In one of the studies, a group of bilingual U.S. Hispanic women viewed ads that featured women in different scenarios. The participants saw the ads in one language (English or Spanish) and then, six months later, they viewed the same ads in the other language. Their perceptions of themselves and the women in the ads shifted depending on the language. "One respondent, for example, saw an ad's main character as a risk-taking, independent woman in the Spanish version of the ad, but as a hopeless, lonely, confused woman in the English version," write the authors.

7 comments:

Don said...

Interesting, but is this really the first study done on this phenomenon? I thought that it was a pretty common understanding that switching languages was more than just using different words.

Some years ago when I was a Peace Corps volunteer-leader in Guinea (we were a total of 6 volunteers at the time as the program was just starting up), one of the new volunteers remarked once that I seemed to have different personas speaking English, French and Pular. Kind of surprised me at first to hear that, but then it seemed to make sense.

Don said...

For those interested, a more detailed discussion of the topic of this article from a linguistic point of view has been posted on the "Language Log" blog.

Aaron Schutz said...

Thanks for posting this, Don. Actually, one of the reasons I put this up was because I thought it had generally been shown that language differences (as opposed to cultural differences) tend not to generate these kinds of personality shifts. This relates to the "Sapir-Whorff" hypothesis, which I don't pretend to understand, fully:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir-Whorf_hypothesis

Anonymous said...

So how much weight are you going to give to a study whose sample was Hispanic women living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin?

philip said...

Twice the weight we give to people afraid to comment using their real names.

Anonymous said...

Twice zero is still zero.

Aaron Schutz said...

Let me say again that I have nothing against anonymous posters. People may have many reasons for being anonymous. It would be nice if people would give a "handle" at least so we can identify people over time. I'm not really sure what problem people have with this. If people are being intensely problematic, that's an issue whether they are anonymous or not.

As to the question, the usefulness of a particular sample depends on what you are trying to accomplish. if you are just trying to explore possible effects of language, then you need to start somewhere, and the authors never said it was something definitive.
In any case, the website linked by Don does a nice job of laying out more substantive issues with the study. As I noted, I posted this in part because as far as I know, this kind of relationship between personality and language has not been found in the past. The link that Don posted at least seems to raise a whole range of problems internal to the study, which is different from questions about the external validity of the sample.