A gamble in one language could be an opportunity in another. In a recently published study, psychologists at the University of Chicago examined what happened when participants in a series of experiments weighed their odds in high-risk situations, like profit and loss, in a language other than their native tongue. During one experiment, a group of native English speakers who were also proficient in Spanish completed a betting game as follows:

According to the press release:

Each participant received $15 in dollar bills, from which they took $1 for each bet. They could either keep the dollar or risk it for the possibility of getting an extra $1.50 if they won a coin toss. So in each round, they could net $2.50 if they won the toss, or get nothing if they lost. The bets were attractive because statistically, the students stood to come out ahead if they took all 15 bets.

Those who talked through their decision in English were less likely to up the ante – that group only took the bets 54 percent of the time, compared with 71 percent in the Spanish-speaking group. In another experiment involving native speakers of English, Korean, French, Spanish, and Japanese, participants more often avoided taking risks when speaking in the languages they first learned. More.

See: Beyond Words