Attribution theories address the basic psychological mechanisms through which we come to know our social world. The central aspect of the theories is their construct of causality. Heider (1958) suggested that people are "naïve psychologists". He argued that people tend to ignore the external circumstances that increase the likelihood of a particular behavior to occur, and, often attribute the behavior only or mainly to the internal causes; i.e., the person’s character. This bias is called the fundamental attribution error (Ross, 1977). For example, if you see a cashier in the store smiling at you after your purchase, you may attribute it to his or her friendliness (an internal disposition) rather than company policy (an external factor).

Jellison and Green (1981) argue that the fundamental attribution error may be partly learned from the particular culture individuals live in. People in Western cultures are taught that they are in charge of their own destiny. According to Jellison and Green, people growing up in these cultures learn to attribute behavior more to person’s character than to environment in accordance with Western philosophies and religions. In line with this view, recent cross-cultural studies conducted in eastern cultures have raised serious questions about the universality of the fundamental attribution error. For example, Miller (1984) found that Americans explained another person’s behavior that had either good or bad consequences primarily in relation to good or bad qualities or other relevant dispositional terms. Hindus, on the other hand, explained similar behaviors in terms of social obligations, interactions, and other situational factors. Situational attributions were twice as frequent for Indians as for Americans, internal attributes were twice as frequent for Americans as for Indians. Miller also provided evidence on socialization of the culturally divergent attributional tendencies. She asked both children and adults in the U.S. and in India’s Hindu community to think of an act by someone they knew, and then to explain why the person had acted in that way. While Indian children made fewer attributions to personality dispositions and more to the situation than did the Americans, the difference was more pronounced in the adult population. In other words, the internalization of cultural norms was presumably stronger for adults than for children.

Hostile attribution bias describes a tendency to interpret the intent of others who create negative feelings for the individual as "hostile" when social cues fail to indicate a clear intent. For example, when a passenger pushes you at the check-in point at the airport, you may attribute this behavior to his intention to get ahead of you (pushing you on purpose with a hostile attitude). The truth of the matter may be such that his luggage is giving him a hard time with overworn wheels and excess weight! In that, fundamental attribution error is intimately linked to hostile attribution bias. You would likely to label this person as rude and hostile (an internal characteristic), whereas his act can be explained by the physical condition of his luggage (a situational factor).

Miller’s (1984) research on the universality of the fundamental attribution error in effect challenges the universality of hostile attribution bias. Before drawing a conclusion on the overall implications of attributional biases for aggressive behavior from a cross-cultural perspective, it is necessary to provide the link between hostile attribution bias and aggression.

An attributional approach to the study of aggressive behavior explores cognitive construction of causality and affective response. Weiner’s (1985, 1986) attribution theory is based on the premise that attribution precedes emotion. Weiner emphasizes responsibility and intent. Responsibility attributions are linked to behavior through the mediating influence of emotion. Specifically, when people are perceived as responsible for negative outcomes, this tends to elicit anger and help is likely to be denied. In contrast, individuals judged as not responsible for negative events often elicit pity and prosocial behavior. Betancourt and Blair (1992) proposed a model to examine the relationship between attribution and interpersonal emotions as determinants of violent reaction in conflict. Their results support the proposed model confirming the mediating influence of emotion; i. e., anger and empathy, on aggression. The authors also found that attributional processes, represented by perceived controllability of causes and intentionality of actions have a major influence on anger.

Furthermore, several aggression researchers have investigated biases in cognition. Dodge and his colleagues have conducted a number of studies (see review in Dodge and Crick, 1990) and reported that aggressive children display a marked attributional bias to infer hostile intent following a peer-initiated negative event (e.g. milk gets spilled in the cafeteria on the child’s back), particularly when the cause of the event is portrayed as ambiguous. Such biased intentionality attributions are then hypothesized to lead to retaliatory behavior (Graham et. al, 1992).

Dodge and Crick (1990) propose a social information processing model of aggression. In that model, biased cognitions are linked to aggressive behavior. More specifically: The first step of processing any external stimulus is to look for cues in the environment through selective attention to encode the information in order to make sense of events and people’s behavior. Across development, individuals learn to generate heuristic rules and cognitive scripts and schemata to be able to effectively cope with the environmental stimuli.

Once the cues are encoded, they are sent to the long-term memory along with their meaning. In social situations, this process involves interpretations of people’s intention and the resultant causal attributions about the stimulus. An individual’s interpretation of cues has been shown to be a function of his or her selective attention to particular cues, such as malicious or benign information, as well as a function of the use of self-schemata, such as those concerning the probable meaning of similar cues in past experiences.

Dodge and Crick (1990) suggest that in the long-term memory processing stage, the individual accesses one or more possible behavioral responses from long-term memory through processes of associative networks. Responses that are strongly associated with certain mental representations of stimuli are easily accessible because they have a place "at the top of the memory bin" due to recency of presentation or a limited response set. They also are most likely to be brought to mind for possible selection as a behavioral response.

Epps and Kendall (1995) extent the concept of script and schemata in Dodge and Crick’s model. The authors state that an aggressive person has scripts and schemata that represent forceful action as the standard response. These scripts and schemata in an individual’s memory reflect an overall impression that the environment is hostile. Therefore, his or her attention is restricted to a few, highly salient social cues. Unless opposing social learning occurs, the development of these aggressive scripts may be carried over indefinitely.

Epstein and Taylor (1967) state that an individual’s aggressive retaliation is a direct function of the degree to which he or she attributes hostile intent to a provocateur. Moreover, Geen (1998) argues that aggressive children and adolescents interpret cues in potentially provocative situations in such a way that they attribute hostile motives to others, and in general, react in aggressive ways.

Most of the studies on hostile attribution bias have been conducted with children and adolescents. Epps and Kendall (1995) further tested the validity of hostile attribution bias as a cognitive correlate of anger/aggression in adults. Their findings generalized hostile attribution bias into adult populations in ambiguous cases and extended the construct into benign and hostile situations as well.

In sum, an attributional approach to aggressive behavior focuses on intent and affective response. In this context, intent is perceived through attribution. Affective reaction to the perceived intent (e.g., hostile), in turn, mediates angry/aggressive response.

In order to assess the cross-cultural differences in attributional biases, the following section will introduce the independent and interdependent self concepts.

Each person has inner thoughts and feelings, which lead the individual to a sense of private self. Some understandings and presentations of the private self are universal and other features are culture-specific. In Western cultures, the norm is to become independent from others and to discover and express one’s unique attributes. In line with this view, an independent view of the self is considered as " a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against social and natural background" (Geertz, 1975, p.48). On the other hand, the interdependent view of the self, a characteristic of collectivistic cultures such as those in East Asia, promotes the connectedness of human beings to each other. In such a view of the self, the individual becomes complete through social relationships. As with the independent self, others are still critical for social comparison and self validation, yet "these others become an integral part of the setting, situation or context to which the self is connected, fitted, and assimilated (Markus & Kitayama, 1991)."

Research in cross-cultural psychology supports the existence of different self constructs in different cultural settings, namely; individualistic and collectivistic. For example, Trafimow et al. (1991) hypothesized that people with an individualistic cultural background will have more private self cognitions and fewer collective self cognitions than people from a collectivistic cultural background. To test their hypothesis, they conducted experiments on Chinese and North American subjects. One of the experimental procedures and its findings were as follows:

The following hypothesis is inferred from the above paragraphs: People from Western cultures may be more likely to make an error in attributing hostile intentions to others compared to people from Eastern cultures. Specifically, when an external stimulus, such as another person’s behavior creates an aversive feeling for the individual, the independent selves may be more likely to attribute hostile intent to the other person’s behavior and behave more aggressively. There are possible reasons as to why such error of inference is more likely to occur in individualistic cultures. These are elaborated below.

First, the very definition of the interdependent self suggests the connectedness of human beings to each other. On the other hand, the independent selves are autonomous agents, who seek uniqueness. It is essential for the interdependent self to selectively attend to the environment to maintain harmony with the society. Maintaining a harmonious social interaction requires a full understanding of the others’ actions, knowing how they feel, think and likely to act in the context of an individual’s relation to them. Accordingly, those with the interdependent selves may develop a dense and richly elaborated store of information about others or of the self in relation to others (Markus & Kitayama, 1991). I remember my first trip to the U.S with the Turkish Education Ministry officials, who were on a fellowship program. Their main concern was the disrespect they received from their American counterparts. They were hurt and frustrated, because wherever they went American hosts asked them to help themselves rather than serving them and empathically understanding their needs. In accordance with the Turkish customs, I ended up serving these officials and guessing their needs as being the only female in the group!

The development of an elaborated store of information about others suggests that it may be less likely for an interdependent self to infer hostile intent following a negative event. Maintaining harmonious relationships with the members of the society is very important for collectivistic cultures. Therefore, individuals in such cultures may use stricter control mechanisms on their thinking which may lead to damage their interpersonal relationships.

Second, the culture-specific reasoning and view of causality in understanding the external physical, social, and animal world may also account for cultural differences in hostile attribution bias. For example, Lewin (1935) argued that there is a tendency to see behavior caused by the attributes of the objects, an error he called "Aristotelian Physics":

Aristotelian dynamics are determined in advance by the nature of the object in question. The modern physics, on the other hand, asserts that "the existence of a physical vector always depends upon the mutual relations of several physical facts", especially upon the relation of the object to its environment. Accordingly, Aristotle attributed gravity to a falling stone. The concept that the behavior of an object is the outcome of an interaction between the object and the environment was not understood until the time of Galileo. It may well be the case that the principles of physics and other sciences were differently understood in the East. In fact, Nakamura (1964/1985) and Needham (1973) argue that the history of physics was different in the East where the fundamental interaction principle, including the concept of action at a distance was understood in China 2,000 years ago.

Peng and Nisbett (in press) have shown that Chinese are more likely to refer to the relation of the object to its environment in order to explain ambiguous physical events. On the other hand, Americans are more likely to refer solely to factors internal to the object. Fiske et. al. (1998) suggest that causality is differently understood in East Asian and European-American cultures. The authors argue that "naïve, intuitive understanding of the social, animal, and physical worlds differs substantially between the two cultures." They further state that in the West there has been a preference for analysis, "for breaking the objects up into their components and reasoning about their properties in a linear fashion" as opposed to the holistic processing of information .

The earlier psychological research by Francis Hsu supports the claim that Asians are more inclined towards holistic processing. Hsu (1948) presented Rorschach cards to European-American and to Chinese American subjects. He found that his Chinese American participants were more likely than his European-American subjects to give "whole-card" responses. All aspects of the card, or its gestalt as a whole, constituted the basis for their response. His European-American participants, on the other hand, were more likely than Chinese-Americans to give "part" responses, that is, only a single aspect of the card was the basis of the response.

In another experiment, Chiu (1972) showed items with three pictures of human, vehicle, furniture, tool or food categories to American and Chinese children. The participant was asked to choose any two of the three objects in a set, which were alike and to state the reason for the choice. The majority of the responses of Chinese children were relational-contextual. For example, human figures were grouped because "the mother takes care of the baby". In contrast, American children were much more likely to group objects on the basis of observable parts of an item. For example, "they are both holding a gun". They also grouped the objects on the basis of inferential and categorical properties, for example, "because they are vegetables" or " because they have motor".

In sum, the research evidence on the holistic view of the world suggests that Asians are more likely to attend to the environment than Westerners (Markus and Kitayama, 1991). Applied to attributional biases, people from individualistic cultures may be more likely to make errors in judgment of hostility as situational factors may well account for one’s behavior which create aversive experiences for the others.

Finally, the last element in explaining possible cultural differences in hostile attribution bias is related to self-evaluation and self esteem. Numerous studies done with North Americans have shown that there is a strong and pervasive tendency to maintain and promote a generally positive evaluation of the self (Fiske et. al, 1998).

Bond and Cheung (1983) found that Chinese students made fewer positive statements about the self than American students when they answered Twenty Statements Test (TST). In TST, subjects are required to answer the question " Who am I" twenty times. In a comparison of Chinese and American School children, Stigler, et. al. (1985) found that Chinese students rated their competence lower than the American students in cognitive, physical, and general areas. Harter (1983) found that when children, as little as 4 years old, were asked to compare themselves with others in terms of intelligence, friendliness, or other skills, most American children thought they were better than most others. Wylie (1979) also states that American adults consider themselves to be more intelligent and more attractive than average. Ryff et. al. (1995; cited in Fiske et. al.,1999) also found that the Korean respondents were more likely to endorse negative statements about the self than the positive ones. American respondents, on the other hand, showed the opposite pattern. It may be argued that Asian cultures are better in impression management than their American counterparts, but the research shows that when responses were anonymous, self-enhancement for Japanese was still absent or reversed (Heine and Lehman, 1995).

The implication of the above assertions is as follows: As individualistic cultures endorse uniqueness, individual competence, autonomy and independent achievement, the so-called "self-serving bias" may render the independent selves more hypervigilant to (supposedly) self-threatening cues than the interdependent selves even when the threat is not warranted. Therefore, in order to protect their high self esteem and positive self image, people from individualistic cultures may react more in hostile terms since aggression often pays in these cultures. Mischel (1993) states that aggressive behavior in the U.S. is sanctioned and valued by peers, and behaving aggressively becomes a source of self-esteem. Geen (1998) argues that the relatively high incidence of violence in the US is due to the fact that the tendency for Americans to generate aggressive solutions to interpersonal conflicts is greater than for people from some other nations. Archer and McDaniel’s (1995) findings support that conclusion. The authors found that based on hypothetical scenarios Americans generated more violent themes for conflict resolution, the forth among the twelve nations. Twelve countries consisted of ten Western countries, in addition to Japan and Korea. The first three highest incidence of violent themes were from New Zealand, Australia, and Northern Ireland (in that order). On the other hand, anger and aggression may psychologically threaten an individual in a collectivistic culture, and, harm an interdependent view of the self who seeks harmonious relationships with others.

Throughout this paper I have argued that people from individualistic cultures may be more prone than people from collectivistic cultures to commit to attributional errors. Specifically, when other people’s behavior creates aversive feelings for the individuals, independent selves may be more likely to attribute hostile intent due to the following factors:

a) They may selectively attend to personal dispositions rather than situational factors since they define themselves an independent, unique, and separate social agent from the others. (Likewise, the interdependent selves will seek for harmonious relationships with others and define themselves in relation to others, therefore, they may selectively attend to the environmental cues in interpreting one’s behavior);

b) Their Western view of analytical reasoning, linear and categorical processing of information may cause them to overvalue the internal attributes of an object or an event as opposed to the holistic reasoning endorsed by collectivistic cultures;

c) The existence of a so-called "biased" view of one’s abilities and the need to preserve one’s positive self-image and high self-esteem as a unique agent in individualistic cultures may cause them to be more hypervigilant to self-threatening cues, therefore, more affected by the perceived or actual threats, and act accordingly.

The above assertions may have important limitations. First none of the postulations says that people from individualistic cultures are more aggressive because they are more likely than their collectivistic counterparts to commit to hostile attribution bias. Such a proposition would have two corollaries: a) there is a causal relationship between hostile attribution bias and aggressive behavior; b) collectivistic cultures may not experience anger/aggression. In fact, none of the above statements have proven to be true.

First, the relationship between hostile attribution bias and aggression is more likely to be of correlational nature. It is possible that some of the cognitive connections of aggression are consequences of being named as aggressive; i.e., a person who is called most of the time as aggressive might legitimize his or her behavior in the future when mistreated (Dodge and Crick 1990).

Second, collectivistic cultures also experience anger and aggression, but, it seems it is expressed more toward the outgroup members than the ingroup members. Matsumoto et. al. (1988) found that Japanese respondents reported feeling anger primarily in the presence of strangers. In contrast, Markus and Kitayama (1991) state that American and Western Europeans reported experiencing anger primarily in the presence of closely related others. The authors suggest that when anger arises it happens outside of the existing interdependence as in confrontation with outgroups (e.g. Samurai warfare in feudal Japan). Carlson et. al (1990) report that aggression-related cues present in the environment act to increase aggressive responding. Following their conceptualization of the target-based facilitation and harm capacity of the aggressive response, it is expected that the presence of outgroup members will elicit hostile attributions. Moreover, in a review of the studies that examined causal attributions for acts by ingroup and outgroup members, Hewstone (1990) found that there is a tendency to attribute negative outgroup behavior to personal causes. Islam and Hewstone (1993) further explored the intergroup attributional bias and provided strong evidence of the bias while revealing its association with both affect and self-esteem.

Another point worth mentioning is the gender differences within a given culture. Women in general are more likely than men to define themselves in relation to others due to social roles in any given society. Goleman (1995) states that women in general are better than men at being able to read feelings from nonverbal cues by referring to the studies which are conducted with over 7,000 people in the U.S. and other countries. Accordingly, another limitation to my assertions would be the possible gender differences in attributional biases in individualistic cultures. Obviously, more research is needed in this respect.

The hypothesis presented above has important implications. Its evaluation will help better understand the underlying psychological mechanisms in cognition, emotion, and motivation of the individuals from a cross-cultural perspective. If cultural differences exist in such psychological processes then these differences may account for error of inference in attributing causality to individuals’ behavior. This obviously has potential implications for aggression to the extent which attributional biases and aggressive behavior are linked together. This paper seeks to shed light on this link from a cross-cultural perspective.

Moreover, attributional biases may be central to ethnic, nationalist and other inter-group violence. People are often taught to mistrust those outside the family and warned against religious, ethnic, national, or political outsiders. At a very early age, they tend to evaluate their own nation and group positively and express stereotypic and negative views of those "who do not belong." Having learned such differentiations, people constantly create ingroup-outgroup distinctions. These distinctions in turn may provide basis for aggressive responses in conflict situations. That is, what people consider as a conflict of interest or a threat is likely to be facilitated by intergroup attributions. These attributions are bases of mistrust and can be exploited by ideological leaders to create further conflict. This paper also explores the formation of ingroup-outgroup identities through attribution and its relation to aggressive behavior. 

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