Language effects on economic behaviour
01/07/2009 - 31/12/2013
Abstract
Language influences behavior. This study focuses on experimental and field work to explore the effect of different languages in interaction with national culutres on behavior in an economic or business context. In so doing, this project is at the interface of Business / Economics, on the one hand, and Linguistics, on the other hand. This implies that new multidisciplinary territory will be entered. In this project, we investigate the impact of both exposure to the Anglophone culture and the use of English vis-à-vis other cultures and languages on actual behaviour in business and economic settings. In so doing, this project is at the interface of Business / Economics, on the one hand, and Linguistics, on the other hand. This implies that new territory will be entered. Steppingstone is the pilot study of Akkermans, Harzing and van Witteloostuijn (2008). In this study, three arguments are explored. First, cultural accommodation by living in another culture for a while may have a long-lasting but partially dormant influence on behaviour. Second, foreign language is a prime, activating behaviour associated with this language. Third, a foreign language is expected to be a particularly forceful prime for those who have lived in a country where this language is spoken. Testing their predictions in an experiment with 358 Dutch students, Akkermans et al. found that previous exposure to an Anglophone culture with higher values for masculinity, performance orientation and assertiveness negatively influences cooperative behaviour in a prisoner’s dilemma game when the game is played in English. The two-fold aim of this project is to extend experimental work on the impact of language to a variety of country-language pairs, as well as other game settings than the prisoner’s dilemma, and explore the impact of language in a (small) selection of field settings, particularly in multilingual business teams that experienced a change in the dominant language.
Akkermans, D.H.M., A.-W. Harzing & A. van Witteloostuijn (2010), Cultural Accommodation and Language Priming: Competitive versus cooperative behavior in a prisoner’s dilemma game, Management International Review.
Funding(s)
NOI project BOF UA
Researcher(s)
Principal investigator: van Witteloostuijn Arjen
PhD researcher: Vasiliki Gargalianou
Collaborator: Anne-Wil Harzing, University of Melbourne
Research team(s)
ACED/Management