Correspondence Bias and Culture

I was wrong about my statement about correspondence bias in an earlier post.

In that post, I suggested that correspondence bias (CB) has been shown to be weaker in Asians than in North Americans. After reading this paper by Miyamoto and Kitayama (2002), I realize that while there are still plenty of reasons to suspect that to be true, the relationship of CB and culture just isn’t that simple.

In the original demonstration of CB, Jones and Harris (1967) had participants read essays that either supported or denounced Fidel Castro in Cuba, and asked them to infer the actual attitude of the hypothetical writers of the essays. When the participants were told that the writer chose the topic willingly, naturally they inferred that the writers of pro-Castro essays had pro-Castro attitudes, and that the writers of anti-Castro essays to be anti-Castro. However, even when the participants were told that the writer was assigned the topic according to a coin flip, such correspondence bias (the writer’s attitude corresponding to the essay’s stance) still occurred. Participants failed to take full account of the fact that the hypothetical writer had no choice in the essay topic and that the essay’s content doesn’t necessarily indicate their view.

With all the findings (some blogged here, plus plenty more) about Asians being more holistic and more sensitive to the field/context/situation than North Americans, one might expect that if the above no-choice experiments were replicated, Asians would be more aware of the social constraint placed on the essay writers and display less CB than North Americans. Surprisingly, this just isn’t the case (Krull et al. 1999, Choi & Nisbett 1998). Asians are just as likely as North Americans to judge the essay writer’s real attitude based on the position of the essay, ignoring the fact that the essay writer had no choice in their assignment.
Choi and Nisbett found a condition under which Americans still show a consistent CB, but Asians no longer do: they made social constraint more salient by forcing the participants to write an essay on a preassigned topic, before performing the same CB test. With the salience manipulation, Koreans showed less CB than Americans.

In the paper under our discussion, Miyamoto and Kitayama found another: attitude diagnosticity, which is a fancy schmancy way of saying how indicative a socially constrained behavior is of the actor’s attitude. One might expect that a long, well-argued essay is diagnostic of the writer’s real attitude, and a short, poorly written one is indicative of a writer who wrote it unwillingly or less than enthusiastically.

Miyamoto and Kitayama found that Japanese participants are more sensitive to the length and quality of the essays: when long and well-written, they inferred that the essay writer’s real attitude corresponded with the essay’s topic; when short and poorly written, they inferred that the essay writer’s real attitude corresponded to a much lesser degree. Americans, on the other hand, showed the same CB in both conditions.

They also found that the attitude diagnosticity played an online and mediated role in CB. Unfortunately mediation analysis and ANCOVA are statistical tests I’m not (yet) familiar with. So all I can do for now is nod and say “Ah…”

But that doesn’t mean CB and culture is not a worthy topic of exploration. From my vague understanding of Miyamoto and Kitayama’s discussion, I sense some tenuous parallel between CB and ToM…. Anyway, it’s enough for now to make a new CB category, and leave the pile of unread papers and leads for another day.
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Choi, I., & Nisbett, R.E. (1998) Situation salience and cultural differences in the correspondence bias and actor-observer bias. Personality and Social Psychology BUlletin, 24, 949-960.

Krull, D.S., Loy, M.H., Lin, J., Wang, C., Chen, S., & Zhao, X. (1999) The fundamental fundamental attribution error: Correspondence bias in individualist and collectivist cultures. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25, 1208-1219
Jones, E. E. & Harris, V. A. (1967). The attribution of attitudes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 3, 1–24.

Miyamoto, Y. & Kitayama, S. (2002) Cultural Variation in Correspondence Bias: The critical role of attitude diagnosticity of socially constrained behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 83, 1239-1248