The foreign language effect on the self-serving bias: A field experiment in the high school classroom

Joeri van Hugten and Arjen van Witteloostuijn

PLOS ONE, 2018, vol. 13, issue 2, 1-16

Abstract: The rise of bilingual education triggers an important question: which language is preferred for a particular school activity? Our field experiment (n = 120) shows that students (aged 13–15) who process feedback in non-native English have greater self-serving bias than students who process feedback in their native Dutch. By contrast, literature on the foreign-language emotionality effect suggests a weaker self-serving bias in the non-native language, so our result adds nuance to that literature. The result is important to schools as it suggests that teachers may be able to reduce students’ defensiveness and demotivation by communicating negative feedback in the native language, and teachers may be able to increase students’ confidence and motivation by communicating positive feedback in the foreign language.

Date: 2018
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0192143 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 92143&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0192143

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0192143

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().