Interesting.

OK, this (via Mind Hacks) is just cool, even if I don't know quite how seriously to take it. Apparently there's been a fair amount of research over the last few years on changes in attitudes, values, and behaviors that occur when bilinguals (or multilinguals) switch between languages. For example, in one study (p. 2):

Hong Kong bilingual-Chinese managers who responded to a values questionnaire in English displayed means closer to a group of American managers in the US than did the bilingual-Chinese managers who responded to the same questionnaire in Chinese (Ralston et al., 1995).

The explanation, which the authors of the linked study (two of whom I know pretty well personally, and still had never heard of this stuff) attribute to "Cultural Frame Switching" or "cultural accomodation," is that the language primes the culture that goes with it, and the cultures values and atitudes are thus primed as well. You know, I can almost buy that.

But for social psychologists, the mere priming of values and attitudes is not sexy enough. They need something bigger; they need to show that switching between languages causes personality changes. Of course, this requires showing something equally sexy, namely that differences in personality exist between Spanish and English speakers in the first place. So the paper is, like, doubly sexy ("sexy" is, of course, a technical term in social psychology, and doesn't refer to anything related to actual sex... I hope).