Bias

For decades, it was taken for granted that the correspondence bias was universal: People everywhere, we thought, applied this cognitive shortcut when forming attributions (Norenzayan, Choi, & Nisbett, 1999). But social psychologists are focusing more and more on the role of culture in many aspects of social behavior. Given that social psychology is the study of how the situation affects the individual, we can think of culture as an all encompassing, higher level situational variable. You are born into a culture; as you grow up, you learn the rules, norms, and ways of labeling reality that define your culture. In short, culture is one of the biggest “situations” affecting your daily life. In the past decade, social psychologists have explored the correspondence bias cross-culturally (Aronson, Wilson, & Akert, 2007).

            North American and some other Western cultures stress individual autonomy. A person is perceived as independent and self contained; his or her behavior reflects internal traits, motives, and value (Markus & Kitayama, 1991). The intellectual history of this cultural value can be traced from the Judeo-Christian belief in the individual soul and the English legal tradition of individual rights (Menon, Morris, Chiu, & Hong, 1999). In contrast, East Asian cultures such as those in China, Japan, and Korea stress group autonomy. The individual derives his or her sense of self from the social group to which he or she belongs.

            Another study that found cultural differences in the prevalence of the correspondence bias compared newspaper articles in Chinese- and English-language newspapers. The researcher targeted two mass murders, one committed by a Chinese graduate student in Iowa and one committed by a Caucasion postal worker in Michigan (Morris & Peng, 1994). They coded all the news articles about the two crimes that appeared in the New York Times and the World Journal, a Chinese-language U.S. newspaper. The result showed that journalists writing English made significantly more dispositional attributions about both mass murderers than journalists writing in Chinese did. For example, American reporters described one murderer as a “ darkly disturbed man” with a “ sinister edge” to his personality. Chinese reporters, when describing the same murderer, emphasized more situational causes, such as “ not getting along with his advisor” and his “ isolation from the Chinese community” (Aronson, Wilson, & Akert, 2007).

            Thus people in Western cultures appear to be more like personality psychologists, viewing behavior in dispositional terms. In contrast, people in Eastern cultures seem to be more like social psychologists, considering the situational causes of behavior (Aronson, Wilson, & Akert, 2007).

Recent research indicates that a tendency to think dispositional about others, the correspondence bias- appears in many cultures. However, members of collectivistic cultures are more aware of how the situation affects behavior and more likely to take situational effect into account (Choi, Dalal, Kim-Prieto, &Park, 2003). Thus, the difference is that people in collectivist cultures are more likely to go beyond dispositional explanations, including information about the situation as well.

            People in collectivist cultures like the East Asian ones, because of their values and experience, also seem able to override this dispensationalist tendency. They are more likely than people in Western, individualistic cultures to take situational information is particularly salient and noticeable. ( Choi, Dalal. Kim-Prieto, & Park, 2003).

            The Euro-American or Western psychological study of cultures assumed that there was a fixed state of mind, whose observation was obscured by cultural distortions and that related cultural behaviours to some universal definition of normative behaviour (Corey, 2000). When counselors have applied the same interpretation to the same behavior regardless of the cultural context, cultural bias has been the consequence. While there is clear evidence of cultural bias in American psychology, much of it is unintentionally done by people who see themselves as moral, just, and fair-minded professionals (Corey, 2000). Ridley (2005) points out that unintentional racists may be well intentioned, and they are likely to deny their racism.

            Lewis-Fernandez and Kleinman (1994) have identified three culture-bound assumptions about mental health and illness based on North American values. The first assumption is the egocentricity of the self. The second assumption is the mind-body dualism, which divides psychopathology into organic disorders and psychological problems. The third assumption is the view of culture as an arbitrary superimposition on the otherwise “knowable biological reality”.