With respect to the first hypothesis, that Western participants would make a greater number of dispositional attributions that would participants with Eastern cultural heritages, that hypothesis was supported. However, there are a few caveats that need to be mentioned with regards to this. First, the scenarios that were presented to the participants only provided two alternatives to explain the behavior of the person. One alternative was a negative dispositional explanation, the other was a situational explanation could have been interpreted as far-fetched in some cases. Miller (1984) found that the tendency for Westerners to make internal attributions was higher for deviant behaviors. Morris and Peng (1994) found that explanations provided by Westerners for certain behaviors focused on negative dispositional aspects. There were no instances of positive explanatory behaviors in the survey, nor was there much information about the event to go on. Thus, Western subjects may have simply picked the easiest explanation, whereas Eastern subjects may have went for the most descriptive explanation (Choi et al., 2003). By not providing a more balanced number of scenarios (positive and negative attributions) more alternative choices, and a neutral point the results are actually inconclusive at this time. Thus a cognitive bias such as confirmation bias or attributional error may not have played an important role in the current findings.
The second hypothesis was not supported, that is that those from Eastern backgrounds did not display lower levels of independence than did Westerners. There are several possible explanations. First the standard deviation of the independence scale in Western participants indicates that they displayed a wide variation in their level of independence compared to Eastern subjects (see Table One). This indicates that in this group there is a broader range of feelings of independence, whereas Easterners were a more homogeneous group. Moreover, this variance reduced the power of the t-test. A multivariate test such as MANOVA combining more than one dependent variable may have offered greater statistical power. Finally, it also should be noted that the Eastern group may have been more acculturated to the notion of personal individuality as they had been in the U.S. For some time.
This study could be improved by offering more choices in the...
Furthermore, the significance of this theory also extends to issues relating to health. This refers to the fact that the individual differences in attribution style and perception can lead to positive and negative implications for the individual. For example, "…differences in attributional style may lead to depression…and health problems with those who had a more pessimistic explanatory style. Baseball players with a pessimistic style died earlier than optimistic players (
Attribution and Cultural Differences Attribution Attribution of failure and cultural differences in business 'Personal responsibility' is a common buzzword in American political and business life. Americans are often more forgiving of politicians and CEOs who accept responsibility for the mistakes they have made. Individual responsibility is seen as a positive value, but this is not true of all cultures. In more collectivist cultures, the stress is upon collective and 'team' responsibility when things
Racial and Ethnic Differences National Contexts A sociologist analyze racial ethnic differences national contexts. For, U.S., tend race a . In order develop skill, select analyze a society demonstrating ethnic stratification conflict, including evidence prejudice discrimination. In sociology, the predominant line of thought has favored new prejudice interpretations, arguing for the continuing relevance of prejudice and discrimination in forming political opinions and in generating discrimination. New prejudice theories have argued that modern
Actor-Observer Affect Examined With Young Drivers The actor-observer effect has been studied in great detail with mixed results. The goal of this study is to determine if by using a situation that is more socially undesirable, the attributions used by the respondents will offer a more definite bias. The question is whether the observer exhibits more risky driving behavior or do his/her friends. A set of survey questions was answered by
). Over time, from one second to the next, human behavior constantly changes, contributing to the fact that human behavior, consequently human cognition, constitutes a dynamic process. (Thelen and Smith, 1994). Communication, also a continuous interactive process, serves as the overtime interaction between the human motivated information processing system and the communication message. (Geiger and Reeves, 1993; Lang, 2000; Rafaeli, 1988) Media multitasking indicates a user will simultaneously experience exposure to content
Perusing the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP) for the year 1980 revealed several trends in the studies produced across that year. There were a large number of studies comparing gender differences on a number of variables in the year 1980. Probably more studies looked at gender differences on some quality than any other single independent variable (this finding most likely would occur in many years of JPSP). Other
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