Attribution Bias in South Korea, Japan, Germany, USA: Intercultural and Intracultural Differences

Andrea Zo-Rong WucherpfennigUniversity of Hamburg

Shinobu Kitayama University of Michigan

Mayumi KarasawaTokyo Woman’s Christian University

A. Timur SevincerUniversity of Hamburg

Henrik SingmannUniversity of Hamburg

Poster presented at the Association For Psychological Science 21st Annual Convention, May 22-25 2009, in San Francisco, CA

Methodology

Discussion

Introduction

Past research found that people from different cultures differ in the way they explain behavior (Nisbett, Peng, Choi, & Norenzayan, 2001): Whereas Asians tend to consider situational factors stronger (e.g., social norms) in their explanations, Westerners tend to focus stronger on dispositional factors (e.g., the personality). Hence, a dispositional attribution bias seems to be typical for individualistic, Western countries and a reduced dispositional attribution bias seems to be typical for collectivistic, Asian countries. However, in most of the studies the USA represented Western countries, and Japan represented Asian countries. This might lead to criticism that findings of single countries are over-generalized to a cultural dichotomy of East versus West. Therefore, we compared South Koreans’, Japanese’s, US-Americans’ and Germans’ attribution style.

The Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE)

Causal attribution is the individual’s explanation for observed or experienced behavior. It has either a dispositional (e.g., egoism) or a situational locus (e.g., peer pressure). The FAE is the general attribution tendency to overestimate dispositional influence and underestimate situational influence on observed behavior.

Interdependence and Independence and the FAE• Cultures differ in type of self-construal (Markus & Kitayama, 1991)• Asians’ self-construal more interdependent, less independent: Focus on the connectedness of individuals Observer has attention on the situation and assumption of interconnectedness reduced FAE• Westerners more independent, less interdependent:Focus on the expression of the individual’s dispositions Observer has attention on the actor and assumption of internal locus of control pronounced FAE

This study adds evidence to the assumption of cultural factors as a source for psychological variation. The results suggest a continuous distribution of the dispositional bias, with the Western cluster on one end, Korea in the middle and Japan on the other end, rather than an Eastern versus a Western cluster. The different magnitude of FAE corresponds to the different percentages of Christian religion in each country. Therefore, we conclude that the predominant religion in a culture has an influence on the individuals self-construal.

Sample characteristic USA Germany South Korea Japan

Sample Size N 94 125 118 115

Gender Female / Male / Unidentified % 66 / 34/ - 67 /31 / 2 49 /47 / 4 41 / 56 / 3

AgeMage

SD

18.70.8

26.8 7.1

21.62.5

212.2

Sample

Measure of FAE• Task on dispositional bias in social judgment (Kitayama et al., 2006).• Four vignettes: In half of the vignettes the protagonist engaged in a socially desirable behavior, in the other half in socially undesirable behavior. • Rating of protagonists’ behavior on four scales: Factual and counterfactual dispositional attribution (α = .73), and factual and counterfactual situational attribution (α = .67), on 1-7 scales (1 = strongly disagree, 7 = strongly agree).

Our study included a total N of 452 participants in secondary analysis (Kitayama at al., 2009) . None of the collected demographical variables (gender, age, religion, time spend abroad, etc.) did correlate nor interact with the dependent variables and are therefore omitted from further discussion.

Example vignette (socially desirable):Professional pitchers, like Tom Lyons, are very busy almost everyday during the regular season. The pitchers work hard practicing and playing in games. In the off-season, therefore, many professional pitchers take vacations. However, Tom Lyons holds several free baseball camps for kids living in poor neighborhoods instead of taking a vacation.

All participants displayed the FAE; planned simple main-effect analyses on attribution style revealed that participants in all countries showed the FAE (ps < .001). Participants attributed the protagonists’ behavior more to dispositional than to situational causes.

In planned interaction contrasts, Asians exhibited a smaller FAE than Westerners, F(1,448) = 27.16, p < .001.

The USA and Germany did not differ significantly in amount of FAE (p = .49). Korean participants exhibited a more pronounced FAE than Japanese participants (p = .006).

4,5

5

5,5

6

6,5

USA Germany South Korea Japan

dispositional situational

Religion

Country Christian total %

Protestant %

Catholic %

Buddhism/Shinto %

Others/ None %

S. Korea 27 20 7 23 50

Japan 1 84 15

Germany 68 34 34 - 32

USA 78 51 24 1 21

• We hypothesize that Christianity is a major factor leading to indepen-dence, whereas Buddhism and Confucianism foster interdependence.Therefore, South Koreans shoulddiffer from Japanese in the magnitude of FAE.

ReferencesKitayama, S., Ishii, K., Imada, T., Takemura, K., & Ramaswamy, J. (2006). Voluntary settlement and the spirit of independence:

Evidence from Japan's "Northern Frontier.". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91(3), 369 384. ‐Kitayama, S., Park, H., Sevincer, A. T., Karasawa, M., Uskul , A. K. (2009). A Cultural Task Analysis of Implicit Independence: Comparing

North America, Western Europe, and East Asia. Manuscript submitted for publication.Markus, H. R., & Kitayama, S. (1991). Culture and the Self Implications for Cognition, Emotion, and Motivation. ‐ Psychological Review,

98(2), 224 253.‐Nisbett, R. E., Peng, K., Choi, I., & Norenzayan, A. (2001). Culture and systems of thought: Holistic versus analytic cognition.

Psychological Review, 108(2), 291 310. ‐Thanks for the friendly financial support of German Academic Exchange Service and of the University of Hamburg

Results