Hi, I'm Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In the previous videos I've
talked about this idea of a critical period for language acquisition which
seems to be about age 7 and you may have found yourself wondering, what is it like
to be someone who misses that window of time?" What does it feel like to be a child who
was raised in isolation, or a deaf child in Nicaragua who was just a few years
too late for this new school and this new language that emerged? How do these
people think, right? Because our own language and thought are so tied
together it seems that all of our thoughts happen in language. It feels
that way but we might wonder, well what exactly is this relationship between our
language and how we think? So this brings us to what's called the Whorf-Sapir
hypothesis. This was proposed by Benjamin Whorf and named after Whorf and his
mentor Edward Sapir. Whorf proposed that speakers of the Hopi language
conceptualized time differently because of the structure of their language.
This is also called the linguistic relativity hypothesis. It's the idea that
the language that you speak influences your perception of the world. Now how
would we go about testing this? Well researchers have come up with some
clever ways to try to test this so they've looked at things like if you look
at the spectrum of visible light we see that different languages divide colors
in different places and so you could have two similar colors that in one
language we have two words for these colors, they're considered to be
different, and in another language we use the same term for both of those colors.
So you might think well maybe this influences people's perception of those
colors, maybe it influences their memory for those colors right? I ask you to
remember these, one of these two colors, if you have a different word for it that
might help you versus if you don't you might mix them up, mix up those two
colors later. Or we could think about how language might influence time perception
like Whorf suggested with the Hopi language. So might think well maybe
reading from left to right or right to left or top to bottom maybe that
influences how people perceive the passage of time, how they think about the
relationship of things over time. So researchers have looked into this and
what seems to be clear is it's not the case that there's linguistic determinism.
In other words, your language doesn't determine how you think about the world.
That's certainly not true but there may be
room for this relativity idea. It might be the case that your language has some
influence on your thought but it's difficult to assess reliably and the
results of these studies have been mixed. Now I think of this language and thought
relationship occasionally when I see sort of like BuzzFeed type articles on
things like untranslatable words. I always find these articles rather silly
because of course the words can be translated because otherwise you
couldn't write the article. So just because we don't have a single term for
something doesn't mean that we can't conceptualize it, right? So just because
German has schadenfreude doesn't mean that, you know, English doesn't have this
word and therefore I can't conceptualize taking joy in someone else's suffering.
In fact I may experience it myself from time to time. Alright so it's kind
of silly to try to think of, well of course we can use, we might not have a
single word, but we can use other words to describe the concept and that means
we can think about it. But we might wonder well some of these untranslatable
terms seem to have more to do with culture and cultural perceptions so
bringing in the idea of culture here makes this even more complicated because
language and culture are so closely tied to one another. We certainly accept
that culture influences people's perception of the world. The way that you
think is influenced by your culture, there's really not a lot of debate on
that. There's debate on the specifics of how this occurs, but it's generally
pretty well accepted that your culture is going to influence how you think. So
how do we separate language from that? We have this sort of braid of language and
thought and culture and they're all twisted together. So how do we separate
them? One thing that we can do is we can think about how language might
influence thought within individuals. What do I mean by that? Well, here I'm
referring to the idea that it could be the case that people who speak multiple
languages think differently in those different languages. So you have the same
person and different types of thoughts depending on what which language they
use. So studies have been done with bilingual individuals and one thing
that's been found in Mandarin and English bilingual individuals and
English and Spanish bilingual individuals that if they take
personality tests in the different languages they actually get different
results. So their personality traits will change
slightly depending on whether they take the test in English or in Spanish or in
Mandarin. This indicates that maybe language does influence thought, at least
within individuals and then we can wonder about, well, what about within a
language? So what do I mean by that? We might wonder within a language how
much does word choice influence how people think about things? Is there
really this influence of Orwellian Newspeak? We might think of in Beijing
the haze around the city is often referred to "wu mai" which means "foggy
haze" but a good deal of that haze isn't just fog. It's "pollution" or "wu ran" and so
we might wonder, does calling it "foggy haze" influence how people think about their
environment rather than if we called it pollution? We might also wonder in more
recent events whether it influences people's thought if we call something an
"alternative fact" versus a "lie" or a "distortion". So how does word choice
within a language influence how people think? We've actually already seen an
example of this when we saw Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer's study on
reconstructive memory. This is the idea that the wording of a question
actually influenced people's recall of the event. So when people saw this car
crash video, if they were asked a question about the cars "smashing" into
each other they gave a higher speed estimate than if they were asked about
the cars "hitting" each other and this suggests a role of language influencing
thought. We also saw it in the follow up where a week later people remembered
seeing broken glass if the word smashed had been used but they were less likely
to remember seeing broken glass if the word hit had been used. This suggests a
role of language on thought within a single language and this is something
that we're going to look at in a future video. We'll look at the role of language
and framing of questions on how people make decisions. All right so we don't
have a clear answer to this question of how language influences thought but we
can see some examples where it may play a role and we'll look at those again in
a future video. I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and
subscribe to the channel more. Thanks for watching!