Language Log changes personality
There have been rumblings. It has been hinted by some out
there in cyberspace that all we do on LL is call bullshit.
Journalist/politician/academic says X about language, LL says it's BS.
Enough of your complaining about our complaining - we will complain no
more. From now on, it's all good.
Now, let's see, what did this morning's mailbag bring in? Why, Eric
Bakovic spotted a wonderful article about language in the UK's Daily
Telegraph, a broadsheet which, with a sensuously right winged
tinge to its reporting, embodies all that is good in the British press.
On the basis of a study of bilinguals speaking in different language,
it turns out that "English-speaking Americans are typically more
conscientious, agreeable and outgoing than native Mexicans, but also
less neurotic.'' Well, who'd have thought?
Here's the
masterpiece
in full:
A
second language 'changes personality'
By Robert
Matthews
(Filed: 03/07/2005)
If
only Basil Fawlty had learnt a little Spanish.
Psychologists
have discovered that people take on the characteristics
of foreign nationals when they switch into their language - and such a
change in the embittered hotel owner could well have improved life for
the hapless Manuel.
The
personality changes, however, run deeper than a desire to
gesticulate wildly when talking in Italian or to plunge into gloom when
speaking Russian. According to research, using different languages
alters basic characteristics traits such as extroversion and
neuroticism.
Researchers
at the University of Texas made the discovery while
studying the personality traits of bilingual English and Spanish
speakers in the United States and Mexico. They began by establishing
the attributes of native speakers, using the results of personality
tests on almost 170,000 people.
The
results showed that English-speaking Americans are typically more
conscientious, agreeable and outgoing than native Mexicans, but also
less neurotic.
|
By the most minor of oversights, the article's explicit citation to the
original study was accidentally cut off by the typesetters. Not that we
mind. Why confuse the reader with details like who wrote the thing,
when "Researchers at the University of Texas" tells us all we need. But you know how we are at Language Log - bunch of geeks.
Details, details, details. We can't help ourselves. So we couldn't help
asking some of our friends to track down the original study. And they
did. It's
Do bilinguals have two
personalities? A special case of cultural frame switching, by
Ramirez-Esparza, Gosling, Benet-Martinez, Potter, & Pennebaker,
Journal of Research in Personality, 2006. Three of the five authors are
indeed colleagues of mine at UT Austin (I have a split academic
personality, but expect to be cured soon), and so I emailed a couple of
them. The first author, Nairan Ramirez-Esparza asked me to post
this link
to an article which says what they did in their own words. And these
words are just the slightest little bit different from those in the
Telegraph. They don't conclude that English-speaking Americans differ
from Mexicans, but rather that along various dimensions bilinguals
speaking English score differently on various personality scales than
when they are speaking Spanish. It's a careful piece of work, and a
cute result.
But there *are* some results mentioned in the original paper that more
closely resemble what is concluded in the last sentence of the Daily
Telegraph article, and these are based on results of studies using
internet questionnaires (discussed in
Should
we trust Web-based studies? A comparative analysis of six
preconceptions about Internet questionnaires, Gosling, S. D.,
Vazire, S., Srivastava, S., & John, O. P. (2004), American
Psychologist, 59.) It is the case that when Mexicans fill
out these online studies, they end up as a group with slightly
different mean scores than Americans, and the differences are
statistically significant. Another cute result. And it means the
Telegraph article really isn't that far off base, though the wording is
perhaps a tad careless.
Now if I was a cynic, I might wonder. What I might wonder is: is it
reasonable to use the fact that the same person scores differently on
the test in different languages to reveal differences in people's
behavior when they speak different languages? Or should we use the same
results to normalize the tests across the two different languages? This
could be used to counteract any biases potentially introduced into the
language of the personality tests when the experimenters designed the
bilingual materials? But I'm not a cynic, so I shouldn't wonder. At
Language Log, everything smells of roses, right?
Well, OK, maybe I'm a little bit of a cynic. And I must make clear that
the researchers were fully aware of the possibility that
translating questions in the materials would itself introduce bias.
They used a sophisticated statistical comparison to control for such
biases in individual questions. And they did, in fact, determine that
in one case, the translation of a question might not be faithful to the
original, while for the remainder of the 40 questions there was no
evidence of such bias. Still, I think it's fair to say (and this echoes
the closing discussion of the Ramirez-Esparza
et al paper) that the results
obtained on differences between speakers using different languages,
while striking, are hard to interpret.
[Acknowledgments: Eric Bakovic spotted the Telegraph article via
http://digg.com/general_sciences/A_second_language_changes_personality,
itself by way of
http://lingnews.net/story/152/.
Qing Zhang and Nikki Seifert identified the relevant study. And thanks
to Nairan Ramirez-Esparza, who was very quick to reply to my email
asking for information.]
Posted by David Beaver at October 16, 2006 05:08 PM