Comment: Speaking French makes us do what we are told

A few weeks ago, my seven-year-old son came home with a tooth missing. This was not, in itself, surprising considering it had been flapping like a saloon door for days. 

More left field, however, was the manner in which it was finally unhinged: the lunchtime supervisor whipped it out. 

My son presented it to us in a businesslike, white envelope that he’d been told to acquire afterwards from the school secretary. It was marked simply: ‘Seth, dent’.

I have told several anglophone friends this story since. Most find it funny; a minority are outraged that school staff should be masquerading as dental surgeons. All remind me: “This wouldn’t have happened in England.”

But nor, perhaps, would it have happened in English. 

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Oui, oui

For some time it has been obvious how exceptionally compliant we become when surrounded by a foreign language.

At home we speak only English, to which Seth generally answers in a patois of good-humoured dissent. 

Just a week earlier I had asked to run a brush through his hair. “Not without my lawyer present,” he coolly replied, before bolting himself in the bathroom.

But step outside the front door into French vernacular and I notice how immediately more tractable he – we all – become. We nod, we oui, we roll over on our proverbial backs to comply, curry favour, conciliate. 

When the garage took three months to fix our car, we did not whimper. When a restaurateur turned us away for being 15 minutes too early for a dinner reservation, we meekly circled back in 20 rather than lobbying, at the very least, for an interim drink at his bar. In French, our default is abject deference.

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The foreign language effect

Numerous studies have shown how a second language can alter a person’s decision-making or influence their moral reasoning – a phenomenon known as 'the foreign language effect'. 

I like the example of a 2014 experiment in which participants were asked whether they would push a man off a bridge into the path of an oncoming train in order to save five people obliviously working on the track further down the line. 

Most would prefer to take no action at all, but when told to consider the dilemma in their adopted rather than mother tongue, participants were up to twice as likely to stomach a utilitarian shove.

The report concluded that using a foreign language is less likely to trigger an emotional response, leaving us more able to make pragmatic decisions. But could this also, as in the case of tooth-gate, make us more pliant?

Here, it was not so much the fact the lunchtime supervisor extracted my son’s tooth that was noteworthy, but that he let her do it so readily. She asked him to run for a tissue first. He did. To open wide while she got a purchase on the tooth. He did. 

Did he show even half that alacrity when I asked he merely brush his teeth the night before? He did not.

Today’s lunch break was mercifully orthodontics-free. Some girls in the year above invited him to play dogs for a little while. 

He, alone, played the dog. He didn’t like it much. “All they wanted was for me to donne la patte.” And did he donne la patte? You bet he did. We are all good doggies here.

Do you feel more amenable when speaking French? Why do you think this is? Share your experiences at letters@connexionfrance.com