As a trilingual, I would still advise against doing learning a newer language for the sole sake of gaining rationality skills. There are much better and cost-efficient ways to improve rationality besides learning a newer language, which would likely take years, or depending on the language, decades, to fully master.
To answer your question, strangely enough, now that this topic has been brought up, I do have a slight change in personality whenever I switch to a different language conversationally, although I might have to experiment further if it affects whether I am more or less rational.
It would be interesting to find out how the bias-reducing effect is related to the mastery of the language. I guess that fully mastering the language is not necessary for this effect, and even could reduce it.
My model is that by speaking in a foreign language we have to pay more attention to our thoughts, and we have to make more things explicit. Thus it is more difficult for some biases to be unnoticed. Fully mastering the language would make the biases easier too.
(I am not sure about the cost-efficiency, because I don’t know how strong is the effect, and how strong are effects of alternative methods. If the effect is strong, perhaps spending two weeks learning Esperanto using Anki would be worth doing. But I guess the effect is not very strong.)
… but honestly learning languages early on is a good investment for several other reasons. Not only for social and economical reasons, but also due to it becoming a lot harder to learn languages later on in life (please do correct me if this is a myth).
If you on the other hand stay learning languages during your youth, becoming fluent in a language takes less and less time (at least according to my own experience and that of all of the polyglots I know).
Also I’d say that being able to call on different aspects of your personality is a very valuable trait. If you combine the use of standard associations exercises (and hence have an above average control of your emotional state) with keying different associational patterns to different languages you’ll achieve a capacity for holistic problem solving and idea generation that I’d expect to be soaring high above the average levels.
As a trilingual, I would still advise against doing learning a newer language for the sole sake of gaining rationality skills. There are much better and cost-efficient ways to improve rationality besides learning a newer language, which would likely take years, or depending on the language, decades, to fully master.
To answer your question, strangely enough, now that this topic has been brought up, I do have a slight change in personality whenever I switch to a different language conversationally, although I might have to experiment further if it affects whether I am more or less rational.
It also happens to me.
It would be interesting to find out how the bias-reducing effect is related to the mastery of the language. I guess that fully mastering the language is not necessary for this effect, and even could reduce it.
My model is that by speaking in a foreign language we have to pay more attention to our thoughts, and we have to make more things explicit. Thus it is more difficult for some biases to be unnoticed. Fully mastering the language would make the biases easier too.
(I am not sure about the cost-efficiency, because I don’t know how strong is the effect, and how strong are effects of alternative methods. If the effect is strong, perhaps spending two weeks learning Esperanto using Anki would be worth doing. But I guess the effect is not very strong.)
… but honestly learning languages early on is a good investment for several other reasons. Not only for social and economical reasons, but also due to it becoming a lot harder to learn languages later on in life (please do correct me if this is a myth).
If you on the other hand stay learning languages during your youth, becoming fluent in a language takes less and less time (at least according to my own experience and that of all of the polyglots I know).
Also I’d say that being able to call on different aspects of your personality is a very valuable trait. If you combine the use of standard associations exercises (and hence have an above average control of your emotional state) with keying different associational patterns to different languages you’ll achieve a capacity for holistic problem solving and idea generation that I’d expect to be soaring high above the average levels.