Attribution Errors
From Cultural Evolution: How Darwinian Theory Can Explain Human Culture & Synthesize the Social Sciences, by Alex Mesoudi, a prominent and influential figure in cultural evolution science:
How can we be sure that culture really is important, compared to genes and individual learning? . . . .
A good example relates to what Western psychologists have called the fundamental attribution error. This is the tendency, found in Western participants, to explain other people’s actions in terms of stable, underlying dispositions. For example, if asked to explain why a student failed an exam, a Westerner might respond that the student was lazy and had not revised well enough, or that they were simply not smart enough. Westerners are much less likely to consider situational factors that are beyond the control of the student, such as that the student was badly taught, they were feeling unwell, or their questions didn’t come up. This tendency is called an “error” because it persists even when it is obviously incorrect. . . .
Until the mid-1990s it was generally believed that the fundamental attribution error was a universal characteristic of human psychology (it was, after all, called “fundamental”). When cultural psychologists started to test non-Western participants . . . however, they found that the fundamental attribution error was much smaller, if not absent altogether.
In other words, making the fundamental attribution error—elevating individual, essentialist factors over collective, situational ones, when it is inappropriate to do so—is a primarily socially transmitted, learned, cultural behavior. It is not a universal behavioral blindspot
Perhaps, when I have written about individualistic biases in (Western) education in the past—for example, in “A Vaccine for Ignorance” (“in every case, science offers us a collectivist and continuous view of ourselves, which strongly contradicts our folk-psychological individualistic and discrete view”), in “Our Vanishing Conscience” (“individualism in matters of conscience was an argument they could not let go of, leading to a desperate search for—and pretend finding of—immaculately conceived learning, in their ‘hearts’”), and in “The Science of Cultural Evolution”—I have been in fact writing about the West’s constant stumbling into the fundamental attribution error, where dealing with formative education—at bottom, a social, cultural enterprise—is simply an uncomfortable fit with an individualistic way of thinking.
Michael Morris and Kaiping Peng, for example, asked American and Chinese participants to read a newspaper report of a real-life murder case in which a Chinese physics student named Gang Lu shot his PhD advisor, several bystanders, and then himself after he lost an award competition and failed to get an academic job. American participants, more than Chinese participants, attributed the behavior of Lu to internal dispositions, agreeing more with statements such as “Lu had chronic personality problems,” “Lu drove himself crazy by putting too much pressure on himself,” and “If Lu couldn’t win, he didn’t care about anything else.” Chinese participants were more likely to appeal to situational explanations, agreeing more with statements such as “The recession has hurt the job market, which places stress on people seeking a new job,” “The advisor failed in his duties to help Gang Lu and respond to his increasing frustration,” and “American movies and television glorify violent revenge tactics.”
Certainly both situational and dispositional explanations coexist for any complex human behavior, including murder. What cultural evolution science shows is that whole societies can lean heavily toward one or the other set of explanations, even when doing so makes life harder or leads to other negative consequences, and that the Western “lean” toward cognitive-psychological individualism—far from being a universal—is an error in some circumstances, one transmitted socially within cultures, and thus one that can be ‘corrected’ via the same mechanisms (time being key among them).
Similar cross-cultural studies comparing North American and East Asian participants have revealed many other differences in thinking styles. Numerous psychological phenomena once thought to be human universals have been found to be weaker or absent in non-Western, typically East Asian, populations, such as cognitive dissonance (the anxiety brought about by simultaneously holding contradictory beliefs). Other studies have revealed differences in basic processes of attention, memory, and perception. For example, East Asian participants show better memory for the position of an object relative to other objects, while Western participants show better memory for the features of single objects. Psychologist Richard Nisbett and colleagues have argued that these East-West differences can be described along a single dimension, with an East Asian thinking style characterized as “holistic,” and a Western thinking style characterized as “analytic.” Eastern holistic thinking focuses on the relations between objects and people (recognizing, for example, the role of situational factors in the murder case), whereas Western analytic thinking focuses on the characteristics and dispositions of individual objects and people. In short, the consensus from recent research in cultural psychology is that our thinking and behavior is [sic] deeply influenced by culture.
It is interesting that, in the West, when ‘holistic’ is drawn from the quiver, it is used to attack cognitive-psychological analyticism and to defend “the whole child,” both of which are steeped in individualistic, analytic traditions.
