Summary of the specific psychological process, behaviour and phenomenon

Norenzayan and Nisbett’s article on Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE)

Norenzayan and Nisbett’s article investigates the subject of Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE). The FAE refers to the tendency to describe an individual’s behavior based on internal characteristics such as disposition or personality, while underestimating the influence of external elements such as situational effects on another person’s behavior (Norenzayan and Nisbett 132). Furthermore, the FAE is frequently associated with other sociocultural psychological occurrences or the correspondence bias. In this regard, correspondence bias is used to describe the tendency to deduce constant personality features from behaviors of other people even when the trait was generated from situational factors (Norenzayan and Nisbett 132).

The Culture of different Groups

The article by Norenzayan and Nisbett argued that Americans and East Asians have different causal reasoning of culture. In particular, the East Asians comprehend behavior based on complicated interactions between personalities of individuals and contextual aspects (Norenzayan and Nisbett 132). On the other hand, the American usually considers the social behavior mainly as the undeviating unfolding of personality. Therefore, the culturally diverse causal theoretical perspectives appear to be based in more universal culture-definite mentalities in the West and East Asia. Furthermore, the Western cultural attitude is analytic concentrating its focus on the object, grouping it by orientation to its qualities, and attributing causality depending on the rules about it and ascribing causality depending on guidelines about it (Norenzayan and Nisbett 133). On the contrary, the East Asian attitude is holistic, concentrating on the area in which the object is situated and assigning causality by positioning to the association between the field and object.

Findings of the article

The Americans and East Asians behave differently based on their causal association on culture. The findings of the study indicated that FAE is more difficult to illustrate with Asian population as compared to the American population (Norenzayan and Nisbett 133). The cultural disparities in causal reasoning exceed the interpretation of human traits. In this regard, the East Asian persons including Chinese are likely to attribute a certain trait of an individual to other external factors existing in the environment. On the other hand, the Americans are more likely to attribute the traits of a person to internal factors (Norenzayan and Nisbett 134). Furthermore, the East Asian (Chinese) construed behaviors in a holistic manner by describing the unclear physical events especially on round object dipping as the association between the presumed medium and the object. On the contrary, the Americans appeared to offer an interpretation of the behavior as caused by the characteristics of the object only (Norenzayan and Nisbett 134).

More importantly, the East Asians think that the environment or field in which an individual lives determines the causality of behavior as opposed to the westerners who think that causality is caused by the object.

Therefore, the Americans are likely to pay particular focus to the object instead of the field (Norenzayan and Nisbett 132). The concentration of the culture of the East Asian to the field implies that they might get it reasonably difficult to distinct the field from the object, which is based on the idea of field dependence. More importantly, the field dependence refers to a comparative challenge in distinguishing objects from the situation in which they are found. Determining field dependence involves the use of rod-and-frame test which have confirmed that idea that Westerners pay less attention on the effect of field in influencing behaviors as compared to the East Asians (Norenzayan and Nisbett 134).

Why the culture differs

Based on the findings of the study, the origin of the difference in causal cognition originates from cultural differences. In this respect, the East Asian population and American population had different cultural differences (Norenzayan and Nisbett 135). Moreover, the cognitive capacities were eliminated as the main cause of the differences. Additionally, the predicted differences appeared irrespective of whether the Asians were examined in English or in their native language. In this respect, the non-existence of clear alternative clarification integrated with positive evidence from logical past and the merging of information across different types of studies indicated that culturally communicated causal philosophies as the most probable description for the differences witnessed among the group (Norenzayan and Nisbett 135).

The study also highlighted that the crucial disparities in causal theories was a product of economic and ecological factors, which existed in those societies. Certainly, in Chinese societies, individuals participated in rigorous farming for many centuries prior to the Europeans or Americans (Norenzayan and Nisbett 135). The farmers were forced to be cooperative among them and their societies appeared to be collectivist. For this reason, they acquired the holistic thought of the society and the world. On the other hand, the Americans tended to be individualist since it forced them to focus on the object and related goals (Norenzayan and Nisbett 135). For this reason, the social field was not cherished. The mentalities were passed to the current generation in each society since the shared psychological aspects that generate them persist to the present group. Therefore, the historical argument infers that analytic and holistic cognition was initiated from individualist and collectivist orientations in American and East Asian societies, respectively (Norenzayan and Nisbett 135).

Work Cited

Norenzayan, Ara, and Richard E. Nisbett. “Culture and causal cognition.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 9.4 (2000): 132-135.