TY - GEN A1 - Urbig, Diemo A1 - Mühlfeld, Katrin Susanne A1 - Witteloostuijn, Arjen van T1 - Country Differences in Default Social Heuristics and the Foreign Language Effect T2 - Academy of Management Proceedings N2 - Individual-level effects of foreign language use on decision making are often related to shifts between more intuitive/heuristic and more deliberate/rational decision making. Intuitive behavior is substantially influenced by socialization and context. Consistently, meta-studies on the relationships between the use of intuition and specific behaviors in cooperation dilemmas reveal cross-country variation, suggesting that how foreign language use affects decision making might as well be highly dependent on the specific country context. This creates challenges to single-country studies. We, therefore, replicate in Germany a single-country study conducted in the Netherlands. While Germany and the Netherlands are quite similar on general cultural criteria, a recent meta-study on the use of heuristics in cooperation dilemmas suggests important differences regarding default social heuristics. This study thus aims at testing whether the cooperation-reducing effect of using English as a foreign language as found for the Netherlands generalizes across other country/mother tongue settings, which potentially differ considerably in terms of default social heuristics. An empirical comparison between Germany and the Netherlands replicates related effects from different types of experiments and supports the basic mechanism that supposedly underlies foreign language effects–i.e. a tendency towards more reflective decision making, independent of any specific heuristics–, but also suggests significant differences in ultimate outcomes, presumably due to cross-country differences in social heuristics. Y1 - 2020 U6 - https://doi.org/10.5465/AMBPP.2020.15110abstract VL - 2020 IS - 1 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Urbig, Diemo A1 - Mühlfeld, Katrin A1 - Procher, Vivien D. A1 - Witteloostuijn, Arjen van T1 - Strategic decision-making in a global context: The comprehension effect of foreign language use on cooperation T2 - Management International Review N2 - With increasing globalization comes an increasing number of people communicating in foreign languages when making strategic decisions. We develop a theoretical model in which comprehension constitutes an essential mediator for the effects of using a foreign language on cooperation in global business contexts. To resolve conceptual ambiguities, we separate information processing leading to comprehension from decision-making employing the previously comprehended information. For the first step, we demonstrate how using a foreign language can, depending on individuals’ foreign language proficiencies, trigger both lower and higher comprehension. Variation in comprehension is, as a second step and independent of its cause, negatively associated with individuals’ tendencies to cooperate. Our experimental results support our theorizing. This study provides new micro-foundations for strategic decision-making and discusses unreliable cooperation as a potentially destructive managerial group dynamic within foreign language contexts. KW - Foreign language use KW - Information comprehension KW - Judgment and decision-making KW - Strategic decision-making KW - International management Y1 - 2020 UR - https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11575-020-00412-z U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s11575-020-00412-z SN - 0938-8249 VL - 60 SP - 351 EP - 385 ER -