Not only the moral side of human behavior but also the most complex practical tasks related to human life rely on the solution of this issue. Assuming that moral judgment changes when choosing one or another solution, when it is presented to a person in a foreign language, then obviously one will act as prompted by the value system of another language. The case is not even so much about the language itself, but about how a person perceives the system of moral values in the framework of another language as a different picture of the world. Language is the complex mechanisms of consciousness that change moral judgments depending on the linguistic world image and cognitive aspects of information perception. Consequently, foreign language stimulates rational approach to moral judgment, while native one results in a more emotional response.

We face a very interesting paradox: the language can not only transmit information but also transform and even change it. This may not only be an indication that a person sometimes incorrectly interprets the words of the interlocutor, but also point to the multi-level connections of language, thought, and human psychology. This is evidence of how complex is the cognitive mechanism of reception of any information and how ambiguous are the decisions and actions this information influences. Indeed, individuals sometimes incorrectly interpret the received information: sometimes a person perceives it too emotionally, sometimes too rationally. Often, one is inclined to speculate about information, that is, to invest some new meanings that the interlocutor may not even have thought about. This fully concerns the exchange of information within one national language.

Nevertheless, the situation is even more complicated when a person perceives information in a foreign language. Not only cultural differences take effect between native and bilingual speakers. The mechanism of perception in a foreign language largely depends on a concept such as human psychology, which relies on linguistic picture of the world. The direct connection between the language and the thinking of the speaker and hearer further complicates the mechanism of perception of information in a foreign language. In turn, this has an impact on moral judgments that a non-native speaker is capable of expressing if person is given a task that requires a choice between several solutions. Studies of psychologists and psycholinguists indicate that a person is inclined to solve such problems, relying more on practical mathematical logic than on moral principles proper.

The most famous example here is the so-called “trolley dilemma”, which the scientist Costa and his colleagues conducted as an experiment (Costa et al., 2014). The goal was to determine how a person’s decision and behavior depend on the language in which this dilemma is presented. The experiment consisted of the following: a person who stands near an arrow is asked a question whether he would switch the arrow after seing that a trolley was running along the way and he could save five lives. The difficulty is that by switching the arrow, individual directs this trolley to one person whom he will not be able to save. In the didactic task itself, the Christian principle of significance of each individual human life and simple mathematics collide: five is more than one. Scientists concluded that “the increased psychological distance of using a foreign language induces utilitarianism” (Costa et al., 2014). Indeed, we can assume that when using the mother tongue, the emotional centers of the brain work more actively. A native language has shaped certain emotions in a person, with its help he immersed himself in the surrounding world. Moreover, this individual experiences emotions in foreign language and expresses them in native language. A foreign language as a “stranger” hass smaller emotional effect on a person. Science also knows other instances that alter moral judgment when using a foreign language. An experiment with reading “stories in which siblings enjoyed entirely consensual and safe sex, or someone cooked and ate his dog after it had been killed by a car” can be an example (Sedivy, 2016). Those who read these stories in a foreign language considered such actions less reprehensible than those who read them in their native language.

Other researchers have come to a very interesting conclusion and associate this with lesser social responsibility of a person when they are given the task in a foreign language: “The use of a foreign language promoted less severe moral judgments and less confidence in them. Harmful and harmless social norm violations, such as saying a white lie to get a reduced fare, were also judged more leniently” (Geipel, Hadjichristidis, Surian, 2015, p.8). Perceiving information in a foreign language, a person should do several operations in terms of receiving the information. One should reflect on the words spoken to him in order to adequately understand them, consider moral judgment and only then formulate his own position.

The emotional background of the statement is a very weakened here; the person is more focused on logical operations: reception, interpretation, and formulation of moral judgment. Meanwhile, a question in the native language is perceived more emotionally, and causes a reaction related to the autonomic nervous system, which is “comparable to the subjective message of emotional arousal” (Sedivy, 2016). When addressed in a foreign language, these brain centers are unused (or are used to a lesser extent), the reaction and decision-making are more pragmatic. Therefore, the cognitive mechanism of acceptance or rejection of moral judgment is more energy-intensive. However, we can suppose that the field of the reception of information and adoption of moral judgments conceals very serious logical errors and misconceptions. The cognitive mechanisms of thinking and memory closely intertwine the language of a person with experience. This also applies to those emotions and experiences that accompany a person. When choosing between two languages, a native and foreign one, an individual will remember events faster, relying on the experience of the native language. When using a foreign language, obviously, other mechanisms of memory work: a person produces a weaker connection between the language and emotional event, which one thinks about using this language. In this sense, language experience can be the guideline that makes a person formulate a moral judgment. Moreover, the native language places one in a certain worldview system, and this contributes to the fact that language differences in the native speakers form a way of thinking that is largely incomprehensible to others. It is known that the translation of words from one language to another looks at least strange, if not ridiculous. Thus, language is a special structure and model of national thinking, a system of connections between thoughts, words, grammatical categories and the outside world.

This problem looks especially important if we take into account the fact that for most members of international organizations, such as the United Nations or the European Parliament, English is not native. Nevertheless, they make decisions, on which the fate of a large number of people depends. Based on the above, it happens that when people use a second language, they act a little differently compared to those situations when they use their native language. Accordingly, people can make other decisions than those suggested by their native language. In this regard, when using a foreign language, there is a need to suppress established patterns of behavior, dictated by the linguistic picture of the world of the native language. When people speak a second language, they need to discourage native language, and when they think rationally in a foreign language, they somehow need to confront his natural intuition. Using a second language and rational thinking both activate the same areas of the brain, mainly in the prefrontal cortex. Apparently, as soon as the learners of a foreign language perceive certain information on it, they activate the braking center of their brain, which suppresses their intuition and emotions. At the same time, some scholars point out that those who “know several languages can more easily switch between tasks and simultaneously solve several different problems in their minds” (Gold et al., 2013, p.388). As a result, people make more rational decisions when using a second language. Complex cognitive operations occurring in their brain push them toward more balanced, non-emotional solutions.

Although scientists attached great importance to the research and ideas about the influence of native and foreign languages on moral judgments, the problem of the relationship between moral judgment, cognitive mechanisms for perceiving information and linguistic picture of the world remained on the periphery. The correlation of language (both native and foreign), culture and human psychology has a direct impact on moral judgments and cognitive operations of processing the received information. A huge variety of cultures that constantly contact, conflict, cooperate, borrow features from each other, etc. represents the modern world. Each culture is associated with a certain language, which is the predominant means of communication for its representatives, and therefore, they say that the knowledge of one or another language is part of a certain culture. Every culture has evolved over many centuries, if not millennia. From the point of view of cognitive science, the explanation of the behavior and actions of people standing in the way of learning a foreign language may be as follows. One of the main obstacles to effectively mastering the language of another nation is the discrepancy in the psychology of language thinking. As the “pictures of the world”, reflected in the languages, do not coincide among different nations, the cognitive mechanisms of moral judgments are organized in different ways.

This is manifested in the principles of categorization of reality and expressed in both vocabulary and grammar. The conducted studies give grounds to assert that the categories of the native language, in particular, grammar and methods of word formation, “are easier to digest in foreign language learners” (Wisehear, Viswanathan Bialystok, 2014). A word cannot be regarded simply as the “name” of an object or phenomenon; it is a specific piece of reality surrounding a person. This fragment of reality passes through the human brain and in the process of reflection acquires some specific features, characteristic of this national public consciousness. Different nations find different paths from the non-linguistic reality to the concept and, further, to the verbal expression. These differences are primarily due to variations in the living conditions of these people, as well as their public consciousness. Therefore, studying foreign words, one extracts pieces of a mosaic from an unknown painting and tries to combine them with a picture of the world given by his native language. If the naming of an object or phenomenon were a simple, mechanical photographic act, it would not be a picture, but an image of the world in the brain. This image would be the same for different peoples and would not depend on the characteristics of their being and consciousness. The result would be a fantastic situation (relating more to robots than to humans), in which learning foreign languages and translating from language to language would turn into a simple, mechanical process of switching from one code to another. In fact, with each new foreign word, a concept from another world “transposes” into the human consciousness.

In turn, this complicates the process of forming moral judgments in a foreign language for a person. It takes a certain intellectual effort first to understand what moral task they are facing, and then make this or that decision. Moreover, learning a foreign language causes the human brain to differentiate sounds more carefully, “some of which he had never heard before” (Krizman, Marian, Shook, Skoe, Kraus, 2012). All this makes the cognitive mechanism of the brain in the processing of information more difficult and directly relates to the adoption of certain decisions. Thus, the re-creation of a conceptual picture of the world inherent in the studied culture is one of the most difficult aspect in solving the moral problems of those who have learned a foreign language. The difference between language and culture lies in the fact that ideology is the basis of culture and moral judgments, while language does not belong to ideology. It is also clear that moral concepts are expressed primarily through language, that is, language serves as an instrument of moral judgments. The obvious dissimilarity between language and thinking is that thinking reflects reality and is ideal, i.e. does not have the properties of matter: mass, length, density; while language, although it is an abstract system, expresses reality and is material, since all its units have sounds.

We should note here that the process of the formation of concepts in culture itself does not obey rational laws. The way different languages divide a set of names by gender, a phenomenon that no linguist can rationally explain, confirms this. There are many facts in the language that we cannot understand. Many foreign language connoisseurs have a vague feeling that, for example, two grammatical types in French – masculine and feminine, are in some way connected with the national mentality and corresponding parts of the brain that are in charge of the processing of information and decision-making. It is impossible to interpret the relatively free order of words in Slavic languages unambiguously, whereas in English it is fixed. All this creates a clear framework for the formation of a national picture of the world for a native speaker and sets a difficult task for a person who studies a particular language - to try to look at the world from the point of view of another system of mental values and moral priorities. Obviously, this influences the choice of the answer in the moral judgment about the possibility of sacrificing the lives of people. At the same time, his own linguistic picture of the world may prompt him about the incorrectness of such a decision. You can pay for powerpoint presentation here and get visual help.

We can state that the interrelation of language, thinking and a certain set of moral priorities and values permeates the whole process of learning a foreign language. It is not surprising that scientists associate the peculiarity of moral judgments with the field of cognitive science by conducting experiments that showed “that disrupting cognitive fluency or slowing down decisions decreases decision biases by moving individuals to a more careful and deliberative mode of processing” (Costa et al., 2014). However, it is impossible to realize all the diversity of speech constructions in all the smallest details to the end. In addition, the person who needs to arrive at a certain moral conclusion faces another practical task. Some of the language proficiency is the domain of intuition, not of the intellect. For this reason, we say about certain people that they have a phenomenal linguistic flair. This is directly related to the fact that it is impossible to rationally interpret the sociocultural core of other civilizations, since cultural forms are symbolic and, therefore, a priori irrational. It is evident that only after a person begins to study the world of culture as a symbolic, rather than objective universe, the path of irrational understanding will be finally recognized as adequate for cultural perception and moral judgments. After all, a part of the test group, studying a foreign language, responded to the moral task in such a way that it is impossible to sacrifice human lives under any conditions. This largely suggests that it is impossible to express the non-verbal cultural codes of the linguistic and cultural community for which the used language is native fully. This is the condition for successful communication with native speakers of a given language.

Much research remains to be done, but it is already clear that language is just one of the factors that shape the thoughts and actions of a person. Language penetrates all spheres of life, and in the process of speaking, people will always have to solve cognitive problems, including in the field of moral judgments. The scientific concept, according to which a foreign language contributes to the fact that a person in a certain situation strives more for rational thinking, rather than for emotional assessment of what has been said, opens up a very important aspect of the cognitive aspects of thinking. The linguistic image of the world is very important in the formation of moral judgments, and when a person faces the problem of switching to a different picture of the world, a number of important processes occur in the brain. The mechanism of these processes primarily disables the emotional background of the perceived information and includes the logic of mathematical calculation for choosing a moral judgment. Those areas of the human brain are responsible for the rational assessment of the current situation. In the native language, we observe a reverse process – the linguistic picture of one’s world, known since childhood, encourages a different assessment of the situation and operations in the brain to involve the emotional side of the perceived information. The person here is guided not by mathematical logic, but by moral judgment, which is consistent with the principles of universal morality. Focusing on the emotional side of the statement, people reflect on the motives of their actions, and with a rational approach – on their results.