In Progress – DO NOT CITE Attributional inference across cultures ...

Culture, Attribution, & Automaticity
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target’s dispositions, but can only successfully perform this mental operation when they
are not under cognitive load.
Study 4 was designed to address each of these limitations of the previous studies.
EA individuals were asked to make attributions about both US and EA targets. The
valence of the target’s behavior was also reversed such that the targets appeared happy
rather than anxious. Additionally, some targets behaved neutrally to provide a better
baseline for assessing the magnitude of the automatic attributional bias. Participants
were run through a D-sequence (discounting) paradigm during which they made
attributions about the dispositional happiness of two US and two EA targets. One target
from each culture appeared to be very happy in their video clip and the other target from
each culture appeared neutral in their behavior. Participants were told that all of the
targets were asked to tell a funny story, providing a situational explanation for the
positive affective behavior seen in half of the targets. We predicted that EA participants
would show greater evidence of a correspondence bias when they were under cognitive
load than when they were not under load regardless of whether they were judging US or
EA targets.
Participants
Method
Sixty-three EA individuals (36 female) were recruited at the University of
California, Los Angeles and Santa Monica College after responding to a flyer and were
paid five dollars for their participation. EA participants had been in the United States no
more than six years (mean=1.93 years) and were from Japan (37), Hong Kong (8), Korea
(7), Taiwan (6), Vietnam (3), and China (2).