Effects of language on economic decision making

The idea that language can affect decisions has been widely studied in the discipline of Psychology and Linguistics over the past half century, but only in the field of Economics in recent years. Some of these studies in Economics have attempted to show that linguistic structures of a language are r...

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Main Authors: Lee, Wei Cong, Sim, Nicholas Zhiyong, Ong, Christopher Jun Yan
Other Authors: He Tai-Sen
Format: Final Year Project
Language:English
Published: 2015
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Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/10356/62479
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Institution: Nanyang Technological University
Language: English
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spelling sg-ntu-dr.10356-624792019-12-10T14:12:23Z Effects of language on economic decision making Lee, Wei Cong Sim, Nicholas Zhiyong Ong, Christopher Jun Yan He Tai-Sen School of Humanities and Social Sciences DRNTU::Humanities DRNTU::Humanities::Language::Chinese DRNTU::Humanities::Language::English DRNTU::Social sciences::Economic theory The idea that language can affect decisions has been widely studied in the discipline of Psychology and Linguistics over the past half century, but only in the field of Economics in recent years. Some of these studies in Economics have attempted to show that linguistic structures of a language are responsible for certain economic behaviors. However, these studies were empirical and the authors were unable to disentangle the effects of culture that are associated with language from that of linguistic structures. This paper seeks to examine the separate effects of culture and linguistic structure on economic decisions. In our experiments conducted with bilingual subjects, we manipulated the culture and the linguistic structure to examine the effects that each has on social preferences. We do this by using the English and Mandarin language as a prime for culture, and by exploiting the structure of pronoun drop in the Mandarin language. Our results reveal that the linguistic structure of pronoun drop is significant in altering one’s social preferences, even after controlling for demographics and language background. Culture, on the other hand, was found to have an insignificant effect on social preferences. These results are significant in providing a deeper insight into the effects of language on decisions, and practical implications include achieving desirable behaviors in various social domains through the manipulation of linguistic structure. Bachelor of Arts 2015-04-08T04:51:39Z 2015-04-08T04:51:39Z 2015 2015 Final Year Project (FYP) http://hdl.handle.net/10356/62479 en Nanyang Technological University 30 p. application/pdf
institution Nanyang Technological University
building NTU Library
country Singapore
collection DR-NTU
language English
topic DRNTU::Humanities
DRNTU::Humanities::Language::Chinese
DRNTU::Humanities::Language::English
DRNTU::Social sciences::Economic theory
spellingShingle DRNTU::Humanities
DRNTU::Humanities::Language::Chinese
DRNTU::Humanities::Language::English
DRNTU::Social sciences::Economic theory
Lee, Wei Cong
Sim, Nicholas Zhiyong
Ong, Christopher Jun Yan
Effects of language on economic decision making
description The idea that language can affect decisions has been widely studied in the discipline of Psychology and Linguistics over the past half century, but only in the field of Economics in recent years. Some of these studies in Economics have attempted to show that linguistic structures of a language are responsible for certain economic behaviors. However, these studies were empirical and the authors were unable to disentangle the effects of culture that are associated with language from that of linguistic structures. This paper seeks to examine the separate effects of culture and linguistic structure on economic decisions. In our experiments conducted with bilingual subjects, we manipulated the culture and the linguistic structure to examine the effects that each has on social preferences. We do this by using the English and Mandarin language as a prime for culture, and by exploiting the structure of pronoun drop in the Mandarin language. Our results reveal that the linguistic structure of pronoun drop is significant in altering one’s social preferences, even after controlling for demographics and language background. Culture, on the other hand, was found to have an insignificant effect on social preferences. These results are significant in providing a deeper insight into the effects of language on decisions, and practical implications include achieving desirable behaviors in various social domains through the manipulation of linguistic structure.
author2 He Tai-Sen
author_facet He Tai-Sen
Lee, Wei Cong
Sim, Nicholas Zhiyong
Ong, Christopher Jun Yan
format Final Year Project
author Lee, Wei Cong
Sim, Nicholas Zhiyong
Ong, Christopher Jun Yan
author_sort Lee, Wei Cong
title Effects of language on economic decision making
title_short Effects of language on economic decision making
title_full Effects of language on economic decision making
title_fullStr Effects of language on economic decision making
title_full_unstemmed Effects of language on economic decision making
title_sort effects of language on economic decision making
publishDate 2015
url http://hdl.handle.net/10356/62479
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