What is the source of cultural differences? -- Examining the influence of thinking style on the attribution process

Abstract

The present research is intended to find out whether individuals with analytic or holistic thought have different attribution processes. Cross-cultural research has suggested that East Asians, who tend to have a holistic thought pattern, differ in cognitive process from Westerners, who tend to engage in analytic thought. However, studies that found cultural difference in attribution process may have non-equivalence problems that make it hard to interpret the causal relationship between thinking style and attribution process. The present research extends this by measuring participants' thinking style within a single culture in order to ensure equivalence on potentially confounding variables such as prior knowledge and cognitive capacity. Two experiments demonstrate that both types of thinkers have identical attribution processes and suggest different thinking styles might relate to different tendencies toward situational information, but not to the attribution process itself.