Psychology Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words - 17

Psychology - Essay Example First the results indicate that attribution style across cultures differed significantly between western and eastern culture. People who belonged to more western and individualistic cultures indicated to be more dispositional and less situational orientated than people from more collectivistic and eastern cultures, signifying that culture does influence how people are initially inclined to elucidate a given situation. The culture differences in attribution style is not unexpected considering the widespread research showing that attributions in Western cultures tend to be more dispositional, whereas attribution in Eastern cultures tend to be more situational (Shweder & Bourne, 1984). Secondly, the present study also extended the existing cross-cultural research by exploring and examining, if there were any significant relations between attribution style and racism attitudes, predicting that people, who are more dispositional orientated and more prone in making the fundamental attribution error, would indicate more racism attitudes. However, the study failed to replicate and find significant results in this domain, as there was found no significant correlation between attribution style and racism attitude across dispositional and situational orientation. This failure perhaps originates from the fundamental method and approach of the research. While earlier empirical studies have based their results on controlled experiments, this research has emphasized on random responses and reactions from the participants. The participants have been recruited from various ethnic groups, diversified in religious beliefs, age group, and gender. This is clearly evident from the diversity in sample population which comprise of the majority Muslim participants, a significant group of Christians and a small group of minorities. As a result the only controlled element in the sampling, the equal distribution of