Activating Different Attributional Patterns in Chinese Bicultural Individuals With Language Cues

COPYRIGHT 2014 BY PSI CHI, THE INTERNATIONAL HONOR SOCIETY IN PSYCHOLOGY (VOL. 19, NO. 4/ISSN 2164-8204) *Faculty mentor Imagine a student seated in a classroom when a fellow student rushes five min late. What will be the first thought that enters the first student’s mind? He or she will probably think that the second student is not very reliable or conscientious. Lewin (1935) first noted that people have a tendency to make causal attributions of social behaviors biased toward internal causes. Heider (1958) and Jones and Harris (1967) subsequently made similar observations. Because of the pervasiveness of this phenomenon, Ross (1977) coined the term fundamental attribution error to describe “the tendency for attributers to underestimate the impact of situational factors and to overestimate the role of dispositional factors in controlling behavior” (p. 183). In the present study, dispositional factors refer to personal traits, thoughts, and other factors that reside within the person; situational factors refer to environmental factors not directly related to the person. The student in our example might be well-organized and responsible but his or her alarm did not go off that day. The impact of situational factors is likely to be underestimated as we commit the fundamental attribution error. Psychologists have traditionally considered the fundamental attribution error as a universal phenomenon that existed cross-culturally (Morris & Peng, 1994). However, Bond (1983a) suggested the possibility that the fundamental attribution error may vary across cultures and proposed that research should be conducted to understand the role of culture in attribution. He pointed out that the individualistic worldview was pivotal to all attribution theories. It was likely that people from collectivistic ABSTRACT. It has been well-documented that individuals from collectivistic cultures make more situational attributions than those from individualistic cultures when explaining the causes of events. Recently, researchers have paid attention to the attributional patterns of bicultural individuals and how they vary in response to different cultural primes. The current study aimed to investigate the role of language on activating cultural mindsets and influencing attributional patterns as a result among Chinese-Western bicultural individuals. The sample included 85 participants (21 men, 64 women) recruited via snowball sampling. Each participant was asked to divide up 100% responsibility between a dispositional cause and a situational cause for a series of events in an online survey in either English or Chinese. Results showed that Chinese-primed bicultural individuals made less situational attributions for positive events than English-primed bicultural individuals (d = .51) and that there was no difference in the amount of situational attributions for negative events made by participants in the two conditions. The total length of stay in Western countries did not correlate with the amount of situational attributions a bicultural individual made. The automatic thinking associated with the native language (Chinese) might have cancelled out the effect of cultural priming on the attributional patterns. Activating Different Attributional Patterns in Chinese Bicultural Individuals With Language Cues