The New York Times considers new research regarding Benjamin Whorf’s 1940 idea that language affects how we see reality. Whorf suggested language limited the abstract thinking abilities of its speakers. More recent research suggests this is not the case but language still is a powerful shaper of our perceptions. The conclusion:

For many years, our mother tongue was claimed to be a “prison house” that constrained our capacity to reason. Once it turned out that there was no evidence for such claims, this was taken as proof that people of all cultures think in fundamentally the same way. But surely it is a mistake to overestimate the importance of abstract reasoning in our lives… The habits of mind that our culture has instilled in us from infancy shape our orientation to the world and our emotional responses to the objects we encounter, and their consequences probably go far beyond what has been experimentally demonstrated so far; they may also have a marked impact on our beliefs, values and ideologies. We may not know as yet how to measure these consequences directly or how to assess their contribution to cultural or political misunderstandings. But as a first step toward understanding one another, we can do better than pretending we all think the same.

Language is part of a package of culture that we all learn, particularly as young children. This framework affects our responses to reality, particularly our responses to human actions.