Most people tend to be completely oblivious to the impact that a situation can have on the way a person behaves. For example, a person may seem to be very timid and quite when you first meet him/her, but is only acting that way because they are stressed for an exam coming up, or maybe because they are feeling ill. On any other day this person wouldn't stop talking, and actually could be pretty annoying. The fact is, we tend to make personal attributions about a person's behavior first, and we sometimes fail to even consider the situational attributions that could have occurred. This error of not considering the situational attributions is known as the fundamental attribution error (Ross, 1977). We usually draw inferences on other peoples' personalities immediately (Uleman,1987), and if we are not preoccupied, and cognitively busy in any other way, we take the situation into account (Gilbert et al, 1989). Since noticing the effects of a situation on behavior is the only step that takes cognitive effort, we can easily leave it out. Another interesting and important point about this error, is how pervasive it is in Western cultures, as opposed to non-Western cultures. For example, a cross cultural study shows that Indians tend to attribute behavior to the context in which they occurred, as opposed to Americans that attributed the behavior to the dispositions of the individual (Miller, 1984)
Living in two very culturally different countries has definitely shed light on the fundamental attribution error. I was born in the United States, and lived here for most of my life, so I am subject to committing the fundamental attribution error, but in India (where I moved to when I was 12), as discussed earlier, people tend to take the situation into account. For example, certain teachers would be complete assholes every now and then, and I would assume that they just had a short temper, or maybe even bi-polar disorder. Whenever I would talk about it to my friends, they would attribute it to the situation rather than the teacher themselves, saying that perhaps they were having a bad day, or any number of external factors that could have contributed to their behavior. I didn't realize this at the time, but making the fundamental attribution error could be quite detrimental in the way I see others.
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References
Gilbert, D. T. (1989). Thinking lightly about others: Automatic components of the social inference process.
S J. Uleman & J. Bargh (Eds.),Unintended Thought: Limits of Awareness, Intention and Control.
New York: Guilford Press.
Miller, J.G. (1984). Culture and the development of everyday social explanation. Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, 46, 981-978.
Ross, L., Greene, D., & House, P. (1977). The false consensus phenomenon: An attributional bias in self-
perception and social-perception processes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 13, 279-
301.
Uleman, J.S (1987). Consciousness and control :The case of spontaneous trait inferences. Personality and
Social Psychology Bulletin, 13(3), 337-354. doi: 10.1177/0146728133004
I think it is so cool that you lived in two countries! The fact that you have been able to truly and long-terms experience both individualist and collectivist cultures probably gives you a leg up in this class. I don't think I ever would have realized how self-centered as a whole Americans were if not for this class. AS much as I really don't want to fly over seas, I would like to experience the cultural shift in self for myself!
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