The Impact of Language on Creativity, Change and Collaboration

In this project, we use incentivized experiments to study the causal effect of foreign language use on essential aspects of modern work environments: creative performance, the willingness to cooperate and the willingness to be honest. With our approach to conduct the experiments with language students in Germany, France and the US, and pairings of the respective languages (e. g., Germans processing in French and vice versa), we are able to disentangle general foreign-language effects from language-specific or cultural effects. In total, our study is based on more than 450 observations.