PSYC 3030 Lecture Notes - Lecture 14: Fundamental Attribution Error, Psych, Collectivism

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 3030
• Professor: afdar

Document Summary

Making attributions in intercultural interaction: you make attribution when you are trying to understand the behaviour of other people, we"re not completely accurate in explaining the behaviour, so our attributions aren"t always right, type of explanation. Luck: culture tend to use a different explanations for success and failure. In individualistic cultures people tend to focus on the individual as determining the cause of behaviour. People attribute success to ability and failure to external factors. In collectivistic cultures people tend to give greater emphasis to external causes of individual behaviour. People attribute success to help from others and failure to the lack of effort. Is it possible that the fundamental attribution error is uniquely western phenomenon: miller (1984) Participants american and asian indians of varying ages. She asked participants to recall past event in their life. Variety of question were asked to the individual. They had to describe the cause of actions they had observed in their lives.