How Individualists Interpret Behavior: Idiocentrism and Spontaneous Trait Inference

Previous research suggests that people from different cultural backgrounds differ in the extent to which they describe others and explain their behavior in terms of stable dispositions. But little is known about the precise social inference processes that mediate these differences. Two experiments demonstrate that individual differences in idiocentrism (a personality variable defined by the attitudes and behaviors associated with individualist cultures) predict the extent to which people spontaneously (i.e., unintentionally) interpret behaviors in personality trait terms. Experiment 1 demonstrated this (for male subjects only) with a cued recall procedure, while Experiment 2 did so (for all subjects) using an alternative reaction time measure. The advantages of combining theory and methods from the cross-cultural and social-cognitive literatures are discussed.