The Fundamental Attribution Error

The need to attend to others means that the perception of Easterners is directed outward to a broad swath of the social environment and, as a consequence, to a physical environment as well. Takahiko Masuda and I showed people brief animated films of underwater scenes and then asked them to tell us what they had seen. Take a look at figure 8.1, which shows a still photo taken from one of the films. The American focused primarily on the most salient objects – large, rapidly moving fish, for example. A usual first response would be, “I saw three big fish swimming off to the left, they had pink spots on their white bellies.”

The Japanese reported seeing much more of the environment – rocks, weeds, inanimate creatures such as snails. A typical initial response would be, “I saw what looked like a stream; the water was green; there were rocks and shells on the bottom.” In addition to paying attention to context, the Japanese noticed relationships between the context and particular objects in it. For example, they were inclined to note that one object was next to another or that a frog was climbing on a plant. Altogether, the Japanese were able to report 60 percent more details about the environment than were Americans.

Asians and westerners see different things because they are looking at different things. My coworkers and I have rigged people with devices that can measure what part of a picture they are looking at every millisecond. Chinese spend more time looking at the background than do Americans and make many more eye movements back and forth between the most salient object and the background.

The greater attention to context allows East Asian to make correct judgments about causality under circumstances where Americans make mistakes. Social psychologist have uncovered what they call “the fundamental attribution error.” People are prone to overlook important social and situational causes of behavior and attribute the behavior instead to what they assume are attributed of the actor – personality traits, abilities, or attitudes. ……………….

The greater attentiveness to context has been characteristic of East Asians since the time of the ancient Chinese, who understood the concept of action at a distance. This made it possible for them to understand the principles of magnetism and acoustics and allowed them to figure out the true cause for the tides (which escaped even Galileo). Aristotle’s physics, in contrast, was completely focused on the properties of objects. In his system, a stone fell to the bottom when dropped in water because it had the property of gravity, and a stick of wood floated on the water because it had the property of levity. There is no such property as levity, of course, and gravity is not found in objects but in the relation between objects. ~ Pages 163 to 165 – Chapter ‘Advantage Asia?’ from “Intelligence & How to Get it” by Richard E Nisbett "Intelligence and How to get it"