Cambridge is a place where questions of morality come up all the time. Do you send your supervisor that email telling them you’re ill when you’re only hungover? Do you throw the bunch of leaflets from your pidge straight into the bin or take time to read them? Do you finish that essay or head straight to the bar to join everyone?

Well, if you’re despairing over your tragic lack of morality and ethics, then maybe you shouldn’t read on. Because learning another language is just going to make it worse.

According to a number of recent studies, people who speak more than one language respond to ethical problems differently when they are speaking a language that isn’t their mother tongue. Certainly, I take longer to make decisions when I’m with French or Spanish people, but I put that down more to my incompetence than anything else.

“Our childhood languages hold a greater emotional intensity for us than those learnt.”

Many have heard of ‘Trolleyology’, or the ‘trolley problem’. You are asked to imagine that a trolley is speeding towards a group of five people standing on the tracks. There is a switch next to you that turns the trolley onto another track but that has one person on it. Certain death will occur to whomever the trolley hits. What do you do? Do you push the switch?

It’s a famous dilemma, made even more difficult by the new scenario where the only way to prevent the trolley from hitting the five people is by pushing a stranger into its path. In the first scenario, most people tend to admit that they would push the switch. In the second, most are reluctant to kill the stranger, even though the results would be the same.

In a 2014 paper directed by Albert Costa, it was found that, in the second scenario, fewer than 20 per cent of respondents stated that they would push the stranger into the trolley’s path when they were working in their native language. However, those working in a foreign language seemed much more keen on this option: 50 per cent, in fact, opted for the stranger-push. The results showed that there was no language more likely than another to promote this option – it was simply the fact of working through the problem in a foreign tongue.

Furthermore, in a recent study published in the journal Cognition, participants were provided with two scenarios:

1. An action with a positive outcome but motivated by a dubious intention.
2. An action with a negative outcome but motivated by a positive intention.

In a foreign language, participants were more likely to react positively to scenario one than to scenario two. Foreign language, it seems, moves us to privilege the ends over the means.

So why do we go all Machiavellian when we’re speaking a language that isn’t our own? Unfortunately, there is no clear explanation for this. One theory suggests that our childhood languages hold a greater emotional intensity for us than those learnt in school and at university: as such, when faced with ethical decisions, it could be that our more innocent, emotional reaction of childhood prompts a decision based on sentiment rather than reason.

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Another theory proposes that the nature of speaking a language that isn’t your own involves a more calculated, reasoned way of thinking: it does not come as naturally to you as your mother tongue. Therefore, your mind is already reasoning in trying to understand and express yourself in a foreign language, so that you unconsciously reason about the decision itself more.

We can conclude, then, that if you want to make better use of your reason, then languages are for you. You might just have to cope with being a little less nice