Culture and Causal Cognition
Top Cited Papers
- 1 August 2000
- journal article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Current Directions in Psychological Science
- Vol. 9 (4) , 132-135
- https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8721.00077
Abstract
East Asian and American causal reasoning differs significantly. East Asians understand behavior in terms of complex interactions between dispositions of the person or other object and contextual factors, whereas Americans often view social behavior primarily as the direct unfolding of dispositions. These culturally differing causal theories seem to be rooted in more pervasive, culture-specific mentalities in East Asia and the West. The Western mentality is analytic, focusing attention on the object, categorizing it by reference to its attributes, and ascribing causality based on rules about it. The East Asian mentality is holistic, focusing attention on the field in which the object is located and ascribing causality by reference to the relationship between the object and the field.Keywords
This publication has 5 references indexed in Scilit:
- Causal attribution across cultures: Variation and universality.Psychological Bulletin, 1999
- Culture and cause: American and Chinese attributions for social and physical events.Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1994
- Implicit Theories Individual Differences in the Likelihood and Meaning of Dispositional InferencePersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 1993
- Culture and the development of everyday social explanation.Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1984
- The attribution of attitudesJournal of Experimental Social Psychology, 1967