What Goes Around Comes Around: Foreign Language Use Increases Immanent Justice Thinking

Abstract

Immanent justice thinking refers to the tendency to perceive causal connections between an agent’s bad (good) deeds and subsequent bad (good) outcomes, even when such connections are rationally implausible. We asked bilinguals to read scenarios written either in their native language or in a foreign language and examined how language influences immanent justice endorsements. In five pre-registered, randomized experiments involving 1,875 participants from two bilingual populations, we demonstrate that foreign language use increases immanent justice endorsements. This effect was largely unrelated to foreign language proficiency, emerged only for problems that could trigger immanent justice intuitions, and was eliminated by a prompt to think rationally. These results suggest that using a foreign language increases immanent justice endorsements by reducing awareness of the conflict between intuition and rational reasoning.