Why You Make Better Business Decisions in Your Second Language
The decisions in your second language are probably sharper than the ones you make in your first — and that sentence tends to offend people the first time they read it.
It certainly contradicts how most non-native speakers describe their own experience. You feel slower in English. You reach for words that aren’t there. You reread your own emails three times before sending them, and you assume all that friction is costing you something.
For over a decade, researchers have been testing that assumption directly. What they keep finding is close to the opposite of what you’d expect.
The Experiment That Started This
In 2012, a team at the University of Chicago ran a set of studies that has since been repeated across dozens of language pairs.
They used a classic problem from behavioural economics. Participants read about a disease threatening 600,000 lives and chose between two treatments — one with a certain outcome, one with a gamble.
The trick is that the same choice can be described two ways. You can frame it as lives saved or lives lost. Mathematically identical. Psychologically, not even close.
In their native language, people behaved exactly as decades of research predicted: risk-averse when the option was framed as a gain, risk-seeking when it was framed as a loss. Classic framing effect.
In their second language, the framing effect disappeared. Same people. Same problem. Different language. The bias that had shaped their choice simply stopped operating.
Two further experiments in the same paper found that a foreign language also reduces loss aversion, making people more willing to accept bets with genuinely positive expected value — including bets with real money on the table.
What Changes When You Make Decisions in Your Second Language
The researchers’ explanation is straightforward, and it reframes the whole experience of working in a second language.
Your native language carries emotional weight that a learned language doesn’t. Words you absorbed as a child come bundled with feeling. Words you learned from a textbook at twenty-two arrive comparatively flat.
That flatness creates distance. And distance, it turns out, is exactly what good decision-making needs.
As the University of Chicago team summarised the finding, people are more likely to take favourable risks when thinking in a foreign language, because the natural aversion to losses that makes them forgo attractive opportunities is substantially reduced.
The intuitive assumption is that the extra effort of a second language would make you more reliant on gut instinct, not less. The data says the opposite: the effort appears to push you out of the fast, intuitive mode and into the slower, deliberate one.
There is something worth sitting with in that. Every time you pause to find the right word in English, you are also pausing on the decision itself. The linguistic delay and the analytical delay happen to be the same delay.
Researchers have proposed a second contributing factor beyond emotional distance. Processing a learned language demands more conscious attention, and that attention appears to spill over onto the content being processed rather than being consumed entirely by the language itself.
| In your native language | In your second language |
|---|---|
| Words carry emotional charge | Words arrive comparatively flat |
| Fast, intuitive processing | Slower, more deliberate processing |
| Framing shapes the choice | Framing effect weakens or disappears |
| Losses loom disproportionately large | Loss aversion measurably reduced |
| Feels effortless | Feels like effort — and that’s the mechanism |
The Negotiation Evidence
A laboratory puzzle about a hypothetical disease is one thing. Sitting across from a client discussing rates is another.
Researchers tested that gap directly. A study published in the International Journal of Conflict Management recruited 246 Korean–English bilinguals and put them through a three-issue negotiation simulation, varying both the framing of the task and the language used.
The prediction held. Negotiators using a foreign language showed reduced susceptibility to how the deal was framed, producing more consistent offers regardless of whether the situation was presented as a gain or a loss.
Think about what that means in practice. The client who frames your rate as “what we’d be losing elsewhere” is using a frame. The platform that presents a fee as a discount rather than a cost is using a frame.
Operating in English may make you marginally less susceptible to both.
The size of the effect should not be oversold. This is a measurable shift in a controlled setting, not immunity to persuasion. But in negotiation, small shifts compound — a slightly more consistent opening offer changes the range the entire conversation happens within.
Where the Effect Has Limits
This is the part most articles about this research leave out, and leaving it out would be dishonest.
The effect is real but it is not universal. It depends heavily on what kind of decision you’re making.
A study of Mandarin–English bilinguals confirmed the core finding — framing and loss aversion both reduced in English — but also found that overall risk tolerance didn’t shift. The language changed susceptibility to specific biases, not the person’s fundamental appetite for risk.
Other work has mapped the boundaries more sharply. Research examining outcome bias and the representativeness heuristic found no foreign-language effect on either. Some biases move. Others don’t budge.
There’s also a category where the effect may actively hurt. Where emotional sensitivity genuinely improves judgment — ethical questions, reading how someone is really feeling, weighing harm — the same distance that helps with financial framing can reduce decision quality instead.
The honest summary: a second language appears to dampen affect-driven biases in analytical and economic decisions. It is not a general-purpose intelligence upgrade, and anyone selling it that way is overselling.
It is also worth noting how the research itself has evolved. The early studies produced a clean, striking result. The later work has mostly been about finding the edges of it — which is what healthy research looks like, and why the nuance matters more than the headline.
What This Doesn’t Mean
It doesn’t mean your English is good enough for everything. Proficiency still matters, and misunderstanding a contract clause is not a bias problem.
It doesn’t mean you should make every decision in English. For emotionally complex judgment calls, the distance may work against you.
And it doesn’t mean the friction you feel is imaginary. Writing in a second language genuinely takes longer. That cost is real.
What the research changes is the interpretation of that cost. The friction isn’t only a tax. In certain decisions, it’s the mechanism doing useful work.
Using This Deliberately
If the effect is strongest in analytical and financial decisions, there’s a practical way to exploit it.
Do your pricing in English. Setting rates is exactly the kind of decision where loss aversion distorts judgment — the fear of losing the client pushes the number down. The research suggests that fear weighs somewhat less in a second language.
This is the single most actionable application of the whole body of research. Most people undercharge not because they miscalculated, but because the imagined loss of the client felt heavier than the gain of being paid properly. That asymmetry is precisely what the effect reduces.
Review offers before responding emotionally. When a proposal arrives with an aggressive frame, reading it deliberately in English creates the same distance the experiments produce artificially.
Write difficult messages in English first. Declining work, raising a rate, pushing back on scope — these are the messages where emotional charge produces regret. The flatness helps here.
Keep relationship judgment in whichever language reads people better. Deciding whether a client is trustworthy or whether you actually want this project is not the kind of decision the effect improves.
| Decision type | Second language likely helps |
|---|---|
| Setting or raising your rates | Yes — reduces loss aversion |
| Evaluating a framed offer | Yes — weakens framing effect |
| Financial risk with positive expected value | Yes — less aversion to favourable bets |
| Whether to trust a counterpart | No — emotional reading matters here |
| Ethical or harm-related judgment | No — distance may reduce quality |
The Reframe Worth Keeping
Most advice for non-native speakers treats the second language as a deficit to be minimised. Reduce the accent. Hide the hesitation. Sound as native as possible, as fast as possible.
The research suggests something more interesting is available. In the specific domain of analytical and financial decision-making, operating in a learned language may confer a measurable advantage over the people who grew up with it.
That doesn’t erase the disadvantages. It does mean the ledger has entries on both sides, and almost nobody is counting the second column.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does this work in any second language, or only English? The original experiments used multiple language pairs — English, Korean, French, Japanese and Spanish among them — and the effect appeared across all of them. It concerns the native-versus-learned distinction, not any particular language.
Do I need to be fluent for this to apply? Studies typically use participants with functional working proficiency rather than near-native fluency. The effect appears to come from the language being learned rather than absorbed in childhood, though the research does not establish a precise proficiency threshold.
Does the effect fade as I get better at English? This is an open question. The mechanism is emotional distance, and it’s reasonable to expect that distance to shrink as a language becomes more deeply integrated. The research has not settled how this changes over years of immersion.
Could thinking in English make me too willing to take risks? Reduced loss aversion means accepting more bets with positive expected value — which is usually an improvement. But one study found overall risk tolerance unchanged, and other work suggests a second language can lead to riskier choices in some contexts. It’s worth noticing rather than assuming it always helps.
Should I make personal decisions in English too? Probably not by default. Where emotional sensitivity genuinely improves judgment, the distance that helps with financial framing can work against you.
Is this finding solid or still contested? The core result has been replicated many times and appears in a meta-analysis. The nuance is in the boundaries — which biases move, which don’t, and under what conditions — and that mapping is still being refined.
How do I actually apply this without overthinking it? Pick the decisions where money and framing are involved, and handle those in English deliberately rather than reflexively. That’s most of the available benefit without turning it into a system.
Final Thoughts
The research on decisions in your second language points somewhere genuinely useful: the friction you’ve been treating purely as a cost is, in specific situations, doing work you’d otherwise have to do consciously.
None of this makes a second language a superpower. The effect is bounded, it doesn’t touch every bias, and in emotionally loaded judgment it may cut the wrong way.
But for the analytical and financial decisions that make up a large share of running any business — what to charge, which offers to accept, when a deal is being framed rather than described — the evidence suggests the disadvantage you assumed you were carrying may not be a disadvantage at all.
A Note from Lucas
I went looking for research on how much working in a second language was costing me, and found studies arguing the opposite. That was uncomfortable in a useful way. What stayed with me was the mechanism: the slowness I’ve been apologising for is the same slowness that keeps a framed offer from landing the way it’s designed to land. I don’t think this cancels out the real disadvantages — I still reread everything I write in English three times — but I’ve stopped assuming the friction is only a cost. If you take one thing from this, make it the pricing point: decide what you’re worth in English, before the fear of losing the client does the deciding for you.
About the Author
Lucas Palma is the founder and editor of Info Is The Key. He writes about building an online business in English as a non-native speaker, working through primary research and testing what he finds in practice.
Last Updated: September 2026 | Reading Time: 9 minutes
Sources
- Keysar, B., Hayakawa, S. L., & An, S. G. (2012). The Foreign-Language Effect: Thinking in a Foreign Tongue Reduces Decision Biases. Psychological Science
- University of Chicago News, Thinking in a Foreign Language Helps Economic Decision-Making
- International Journal of Conflict Management, Foreign Language Effect in Negotiations: Negotiation Language and Framing Effect on Contract Terms and Subjective Outcomes
- Xing (2021), Foreign Language Effect on Risk Preference: The Framing Effect, Loss Aversion, and Risk Aversion. Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics
- The Limits of the Foreign Language Effect on Decision-Making: The Case of the Outcome Bias and the Representativeness Heuristic. PLOS ONE / PMC
