From Attributions to Dispositional Inferences: Patterns of Korean Students

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Abstract
The research reported here evaluated from a self-presentional perspective the cultural norms concerning attributional accounts of college students in Korea, then used these norms to predict the attributional patterns of a similar group of Korean college students. The combined results of two studies demonstrated the potential of a self-presentational perspective to explain cross-cultural variations in attributional patterns by incorporating empirical information on cultural norms in the prediction process. In Study 1, a field experiment, students were asked to make dispositional inferences about a person who had filled out an Attributional Style Questionnaire (ASQ; Peterson et al., 1982) in one of four patterns: egotistic, self-effacing, internal, or external. From the results of this study, it was predicted that the mean attributional style of Korean students would be relatively internal and neither strongly egotistic nor self-effacing. These hypotheses were supported in Study 2 with a new sample of college students who completed the ASQ.