According to an article in the Scientific American (link below) people are more logical and reason better in a foreign language than their native tongue.

Basically they looked at questions where reasoning was required (financial decisions  gambling and so on) and found that if they were asked in the subject’s native tongue they were analyzed more emotionally than if they were asked in a learned language.

The main reason suggested for this is that a learned language is more distant from us and thus provides a psychological distance which makes us less emotionally involved in the question and thus more able to analyze it logically.

So I guess this means we can discuss emotional issues (politics, religion, etc) more dispassionately in a foreign language than in our own language! Not to mention going to the casino!

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Original Article – from the Scientific American