No abstract

The authors find East Asians to be holistic, attending to the entire field and assigning causality to it, making relatively little use of categories and formal logic, and relying on "dialectical" reasoning, whereas Westerners are more analytic, paying attention primarily to the object and the categories to which it belongs and using rules, including formal logic, to understand its behavior. The 2 types of cognitive processes are embedded in different naive metaphysical systems and tacit epistemologies. The authors speculate that the origin of these differences is traceable to markedly different social systems. The theory and the evidence presented call into question long-held assumptions about basic cognitive processes and even about the appropriateness of the process-content distinction.

Growing cross-cultural evidence suggests that East Asians are less likely to show the correspondence bias, or a preference for explanations of behavior in terms of traits, dispositions, or other internal attributes of the target. The scope of this evidence spans several research paradigms and diverse methodologies. The cultural difference, however, appears not to be caused by an absence of dispositional thinking in East Asian cultures. Indeed, extensive ethnographic and psychological data indicate that "dispositionism" is a cross-culturally widespread mode of thinking, although East Asians believe dispositions to be more malleable and have a more holistic conception of the person as being situated in a broad social context. The East-West split in attribution thus originates primarily from a stronger "situationism" or belief in the importance of the context of behavior in East Asia. Consequently, East Asians are more likely than Westerners to avoid the correspondence bias as long as situational constraints are salient. One of the greatest and most remarkable misunderstandings we have about people, one that gives rise to many other inferential failings, is the belief that behavior is usually best regarded as reflecting personality traits or other internal attributes. This "lay dispositionism" (Ross & Nisbett, 1991) lies behind the so-called correspondence bias (Gilbert & Malone, 1995), or the preference for explanations of behavior in terms of internal attributes of the target. The correspondence bias sometimes results in the fundamental attribution error (FAE; Ross, 1977), or the tendency to overassign causality to traits and underassign it to situations. The FAE may be said to occur when people infer a disposition corresponding to behavior under conditions in which the true cause lies in the situational context or when the reasoning process leading to the dispositional inference can be shown to be flawed in such a way as to produce dispositional inferences erroneously (see Jones, 1979, and Gilbert & Malone, 1995, for extensive reviews). For example, college students infer, after reading an essay praising Fidel Castro, that the essayist truly likes Fidel Castro, even when they know that the target person was assigned to write a pro-Castro essay by a debate coach or an instructor in a course (Jones & Harris, 1967). People attribute volunteering to a disposition when monetary compensation was the true cause (Nisbett, Caputo, Legant, & Maracek, 1973), and they ignore role determinants of

The authors constructed the Analysis-Holism Scale (AHS) to measure analytic versus holistic thinking tendency. In Study 1, using exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, a 24-item scale was developed. In Study 2, convergent and discriminant validities were tested. In Studies 3 and 4, the known-group difference validity was examined by comparing scores on the AHS of Americans and Koreans (Study 3) and of Korean students of Oriental medicine and Korean students of non-Oriental medicine majors (Study 4). Results of Studies 3 and 4 show that Koreans and Korean students of Oriental medicine scored higher on the AHS than did Americans and Korean students of non-Oriental medicine majors, respectively. Studies 5 and 6 tested predictive validity by examining associations of the AHS with performances on two cognitive tasks (categorization and causal reasoning). Data analysis shows that those with high scores on the AHS displayed the holistic pattern of performances on each task more than did those with low scores.

Two studies examined the correspondence bias in attitude attributions of Koreans and Americans. Study I employed the classic attitude attribution paradigm of Jones and Harris and found that both Korean and American participants displayed the correspondence bias in the no-choice condition. This lack of difference might have been due to weak salience of the situational constraints. Study 2 was designed to make the situational constraints of the no-choice condition salient in two ways: (a) by asking participants to write an essay on a topic regardless of their genuine attitude toward the topic or (b) by also making it clear to participants that the essay by the target person was almost a copy of the arguments provided by the experimenter. The results showed that (a) American attributions were unaffected by the two salience manipulations, whereas Koreans' correspondence bias decreased with increasing salience of the constraints, and (b) Koreans were less susceptible to the actor observer bias.