A seldom-mentioned benefit of speaking different languages
Speaking a less familiar language can be a way to keep yourself honest.
One of the benefits of speaking different languages is getting to think about the same topic in different ways. Sometimes because the same word in a different language calls up different associations. But there’s another mechanism.
This is a lightly-edited message that I wrote in Sep 2021:
RE: writing as a tool for thought, I sometimes find that some of the same effect can be achieved by talking in another language in which I have less fluency.
When a story is important to us, we tend to talk about it many times, and it crystallizes into a certain shape. The story gradually becomes more distant from what actually happened. Partially due to random drift & random changes in memory saliency (possibly described by a Dirichlet Process), but not entirely: distortions are also reinforced by the social rewards that I get from my storytelling experiences.
My German has only recently gotten good enough for me to tell stories. A couple weeks ago, I had the opportunity to tell a new friend a very meaningful story about love and heartbreak, which I’d already told in English more than a dozen times and this was my first time telling it in German.
Because my German speech is so slow, my thinking brain had a lot of extra time with which to examine what I was saying, forcing me to be more honest about what actually happened. It was like I got to freshly experience certain perspectives that I normally skip thru with my hyperfluent English speech.
A cynical view could be that telling the story in German has an unfamiliar reward landscape that I haven't yet learned to navigate... and as a result, the distortion is minimal.
In other words, if you’re speaking a language with less than total fluency, you may find that your mouth is slower than your brain, and you no longer have the ability to ignore facts and perspectives that could make you look bad. Glibness is out of reach.
That's an interesting suggestion. I could see a few experiments trying to test that. There has been experiments on the behavioural effect of language but not on this idea I think.
Gustavo: What is cynical about that view?
GPT-3.5: The cynical view presented in the essay suggests that the author's ability to be more honest when speaking in a less familiar language may not be due to the language itself, but rather to the unfamiliar reward landscape that they have not yet learned to navigate. In other words, the cynic would argue that the author's honesty is not a result of speaking in a less familiar language, but rather a result of not yet knowing how to present themselves in a positive light in that language. This view suggests that the author's honesty may be more of an unintended consequence rather than a deliberate choice, which challenges the author's argument that speaking a less familiar language can be a way to keep oneself honest.