Use of situational information in cross-ethnic group attributions: Do American and Chinese attributers hold different theories of behavior for each other?

摘要

This paper examines American and Chinese perceivers' lay-theories of personality and behavior and their use of situational information for American and Chinese target persons. In a modification of Jones & Harris's attitude attribution paradigm, American and Chinese participants were asked to make inferences about a specific target person from their respective out-groups. Three hypotheses were examined in two separate studies: hypothesis one predicted that the American and Chinese participants would use situational information differently for American and Chinese target persons, hypothesis two predicted that the American participants would have different lay-theories of personality and behavior for American and Chinese target persons and hypothesis three predicted that the participants' lay-theories should be correlated with their use of situational information. Upon examining the results of Study One the results seemed fairly clear, even though the undergraduate American participants reported holding a more dispositional lay theory of behavior for the American target persons than for the Chinese target persons, they seemed to display a group-serving bias. That is, they made significantly greater use of the situational information for the American targets than they for the Chinese target persons. Unfortunately, the results became much less clear after examining Study Two. Contrary to expectations and unlike the results of Study One, the American participants made fairly significant use of the situational information for both the American and Chinese target persons while the Chinese participants made very little use of the situational information for either the American or the Chinese target persons. Both the American and Chinese participants consistently reported more dispositional lay theories of behavior for the American target persons than for the Chinese target persons. However, in contradiction to previous research, the Chinese participants reported more entity lay theories of personality than the American participants. And finally, both the American and Chinese participants made fairly normative use of the situational information when responding to an open-ended attribution question. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for cross-cultural research on the correspondence bias and lay-theories of behavior.