n the first experiment, the team revisited the famous experiment conducted by Daniel Kahneman where volunteers were given a choice regarding whether to save a certain few from death, or try another option that might save more lives, but was riskier. In this case, the researchers asked 121 American volunteers that had learned Japanese to choose between a cure for a disease that could definitely cure a third of the victims of a plague, versus a cure that had just a one third chance of curing all of the victims.

They found that almost eighty percent of those chose the safe option when it was framed in English. The number dropped to just forty seven percent when the question was framed in terms of losing lives rather than saving them. When the question was posed in Japanese however, the safe option was chosen around forty percent of the time regardless which way it was phrased.