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Bilinguals who consider moral problems in their foreign language tend to endorse causing harm to others if that leads to good outcomes more than they do in their native language. Cavar and Tytus [2018. "Moral Judgement and Foreign Language Effect: When the Foreign Language Becomes the Second Language. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development" 39 (1): 17-28] reported that this effect disappears when the decision maker is highly acculturated. We challenge the latter conclusion. Specifically, the experiment reported by Cavar and Tytus (2018) utilised unvalidated and potentially unreliable materials, was underpowered, and lacked a control group. Moreover, a re-analysis of their statistical test shows that it fails to convincingly support the reported null finding. We conclude that further examination of the moral foreign language effect is needed to test its boundaries.

Moral dilemmas entail deciding whether to cause harm to maximize overall outcomes, such as killing 1 person to save 5. Past work has demonstrated that people are more willing to accept causing such outcome-maximizing harm when they read dilemmas in a foreign language they speak rather than their native language. Presumably this effect is due to foreign dilemmas inducing reduced emotional impact, rather than increased cognitive processing, but previous work cannot distinguish between these possibilities because it treats them as diametric opposites. In the current work, we applied process dissociation to independently estimate harm-rejection and outcome-maximization response tendencies underlying dilemma responses. These findings reveal that reading dilemmas in a foreign language reduces both harm-rejection and outcome-maximization inclinations. This pattern clarifies past work by suggesting that reading dilemmas in a foreign language reduces concern for all potential victims--both the fewer to be harmed and the majority to be saved.