The authors evaluate three models of the cognitive processes underlying person perception (i.e., the processes perceivers use to judge whether an actor’s behavior reflects a personal disposition), each of which implies a different way in which culturally instilled lay theories of behavior affect attributions. The models make distinctive predictions concerning how cognitive busyness will affect dispositional inference among members of different cultures. To test the models, the authors compared attributions of U.S. and Hong Kong perceivers for an expressive act under conditions of high and low cognitive busyness. Whereas cognitive busyness increased dispositionism among U.S. participants, it did not for Hong Kong participants. Findings from numerous measures combine to support the automatized situational correction model, which posits that holders of a situation-based lay theory of behavior (such as members of Chinese culture) have automatized the ability to correct attributions to personal dispositions to take into account situational influences.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
Banaji, M. R., & Greenwald, A. G. (1995). Implicit gender stereotyping in judgments of fame. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68, 181-198.
2.
Brislin, R. W. (1970). Back-translation for cross-cultural research. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 1, 185-216.
3.
Chiu, C., Dweck, C. S., Tong, J. Y., & Fu, J. H. (1997). Implicit theories and conceptions of morality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73, 923-940.
4.
Chiu, C., Hong, Y., & Dweck, C. S. (1997). Lay dispositionism and implicit theories of personality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73, 19-30.
5.
Chiu, C., Morris, M. W., Hong, Y., & Menon, T. (2000). Motivated cultural cognition: The impact of implicit cultural theories on dispositional attribution varies as a function of need for closure. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 78, 247-259.
6.
Choi, I., & Nisbett, R. E. (1998). Situational salience and cultural differences in the correspondence bias and actor-observer bias. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 24, 949-960.
7.
Choi, I., Nisbett, R. E., & Norenzayan, A. (1999). Causal attribution across cultures: Variation and universality. Psychological Bulletin, 125, 47-63.
8.
D’Andrade, R. G. (1990). Some propositions about the relations between culture and human cognition. In J. W. Stigler & R. A. Shweder (Eds.), Cultural psychology: Essays on comparative human development (pp. 65-129). New York: Cambridge University Press.
9.
Dubois, N. (1988). The norm of internality: Social valorization of internal explanations of behavior and reinforcements in young people. Journal of Social Psychology, 128, 431-439.
10.
Duff, K. J., & Newman, L. S. (1997). Individual differences in the spontaneous construal of behavior: Idiocentrism and the automatization of the trait inference process. Social Cognition, 15, 217-241.
11.
Dweck, C. S. (1996). Implicit theories as organizers of goals and behavior. In P. M. Gollwitzer & J. A. Bargh (Eds.), The psychology of action: Linking cognition and motivation to behavior (pp. 69-90). New York: Guilford.
12.
Dweck, C. S., Chiu, C., & Hong, Y. (1995). Implicit theories and their role in judgments and reactions: A world from two perspectives. Psychological Inquiry, 6, 267-285.
13.
Gilbert, D. T., & Malone, P. S. (1995). The correspondence bias. Psychological Bulletin, 117, 21-38.
14.
Gilbert, D. T., Pelham, B. W., & Krull, D. S. (1988). On cognitive busyness: When person perceivers meet persons perceived. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54, 733-740.
15.
Glaser, J., & Banaji, M. (1999). When fair is foul and foul is fair: Reverse priming in automatic evaluation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 669-687.
16.
Heider, F. (1958). The psychology of interpersonal relations. New York: John Wiley.
17.
Hong, Y., Chiu, C., & Dweck, C. S. (1995). Implicit theories of intelligence: Reconsidering the role of confidence in achievement motivation. In M. H. Kernis (Ed.), Efficacy, agency, and self-esteem (pp. 197-216). New York: Plenum.
18.
Hong, Y., Morris, M. W., Chiu, C., & Benet-Martinez, V. (2000). Multi-cultural minds: A dynamic constructivist approach to culture and cognition. American Psychologist, 55, 709-720.
19.
Ichheiser, G. (1949). Misunderstandings in human relations: A study in false social perception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
20.
Jones, E. E., & Harris, V. A. (1967). The attribution of attitudes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 3, 1-24.
21.
Jonides, J., Schumacher, E. H., Smith, E. E., Lauber, E. J., Awh, E. S., Minoshima, S., & Koeppe, R. A. (1997). Verbal working memory load affects regional brain activation as measured by PET. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 9, 462-475.
22.
Kelley, H. H. (1973). The processes of causal attribution. American Psychologist, 28, 107-128.
23.
Kitayama, S., & Masuda, T. (1997). Cultural psychology of social inference: The correspondence bias largely vanishes in Japan. Unpublished manuscript, Kyoto University.
24.
Kruglanski, A. W. (1980). Lay epistemological process and contents: Another look at attribution theory. Psychological Review, 87, 70-87.
25.
Kruglanski, A. W. (1995). Implicit theory of personality as a theory of personality. Psychological Inquiry, 6, 301-304.
26.
Krull, D. S. (1993). Does the grist change the mill? The effect of the perceiver’s inferential goal on the process of social inference. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 19, 340-348.
27.
Krull, D. S., Loy, M. H.-M., Lin, J., Wang, C.-F., Chen, S., & Zhao, X. (1999). The fundamental attribution error: Correspondence bias in individualist and collectivist cultures. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25, 1208-1219.
28.
Kwong See, S. T., & Ryan, E. B. (1995). Cognitive mediation of adult age differences in language performance. Psychology and Aging, 10, 458-468.
29.
Lee, F., Hallahan, M., & Herzog, T. (1996). Explaining real-life events: How culture and domain shape attributions. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 22, 732-741.
30.
Menon, T., Morris, M. W., Chiu, C., & Hong, Y. (1999). Culture and the construal of agency: Attribution to individual versus group dispositions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76, 701-717.
31.
Miller, J. G. (1984). Culture and the development of everyday social explanation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 46, 961-978.
32.
Morris, M. W., Ames, D. R., & Knowles, E. D. (2001). What we theorize when we theorize that we theorize: Examining the “implicit theory” construct from a cross-disciplinary perspective. In G. B. Moskowitz (Ed.), Cognitive social psychology: The Princeton symposium on the legacy and future of social cognition (pp. 143-161). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Elbaum.
33.
Morris, M. W., & Larrick, R. P. (1995). When one cause casts doubt on another: A normative analysis of discounting in causal attribution. Psychological Review, 102, 331-355.
34.
Morris, M. W., & Peng, K. (1994). Culture and cause: American and Chinese attributions for social and physical events. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67, 949-971.
35.
Newman, L. S. (1993). How individualists interpret behavior: Idiocentrism and spontaneous trait inference. Social Cognition, 11, 243-269.
36.
Quattrone, G. A. (1982). Overattribution and unit formation: When behavior engulfs the person. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 42, 593-607.
37.
Read, S. J., & Miller, L. C. (1993). Rapist or “regular guy”: Explanatory coherence in the construction of mental models of others. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 19, 526-540.
38.
Reeder, G. D. (1993). Trait-behavior relations and dispositional inference. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 19, 586-593.
39.
Rholes, W. S., Newman, L. S., & Ruble, D. N. (1990). Understanding self and other: Developmental and motivational aspects of perceiving persons in terms of invariant dispositions. In E. T. Higgins & R. M. Sorrentino (Eds.), Handbook of motivation and cognition: Foundations of social behavior (Vol. 2, pp. 369-407). New York: Guilford.
40.
Ross, L. (1977). The intuitive psychologist and his shortcomings: Distortions in the attribution process. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 10, pp. 174-221). New York: Academic Press.
41.
Ross, L., & Nisbett, R. E. (1991). The person and the situation: Perspectives of social psychology. New York: McGraw-Hill.
42.
Shweder, R. A., & Bourne, E. J. (1982). Does the concept of the person vary cross-culturally? In A. J. Marsella & G. M. White (Eds.), Cultural conceptions of mental health and therapy (pp. 97-137). Boston: Reidel.
43.
Smith, E. R., & Lerner, M. (1986). Development of automatism of social judgments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50, 246-259.
44.
Triandis, H. C. (1993). Collectivism and individualism as cultural syndromes. Cross-Cultural Research: The Journal of Comparative Social Science, 27, 155-180.
45.
Trope, Y. (1986). Identification and inferential processes in dispositional attribution. Psychological Review, 93, 239-257.
46.
Wegener, D. T., & Petty, R. E. (1995). Flexible correction processes in social judgment: The role of naive theories in corrections for perceived bias. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68, 36-51.
47.
Winter, L., Uleman, J. S., & Cunniff, C. (1985). How automatic are social judgments?Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 49, 904-917.
