Chinese Cultural Background, Way Of Thinking On The Attribution Of Responsibility

Thinking styles refers to a kind of tendency of perception and cognitive processing when people deal with problem. It is the relatively fixed meta-cognitive mode one race developed in a specific region and over a long period of time. The differences between Eastern and Western thinking styles and its effects on cognitive process have been a focus among cultural-psychologists over the recent years. However, people have different views on the issues about internal dimension and construct of Eastern and Western thinking styles. The debates on the culture particular effect on attribution tendency have still been existed.On the basis of the Chinese culture background and related theories and researches of Eastern and Western thinking styles differences conducted by Nisbeet, Choi and Hou, this research revised the analytic-holistic scale and developed an Chinese version AHS. We also confirmed the internal structure of thinking styles. Furthermore, based on the Chinese version AHS, this study also probed into the impact of thinking styles on attribution of responsibility and then set up the relevant path mode. Our study was composed of two parts.In part one, we developed the Chinese version AHS based on the scale made up by Choi. With the process of revising, we used the exploratory factor analysis of 169 subjects and determined the thinking style contains four factors:change, contradiction, attention, and causality. And then we manipulated the confirmatory factor analysis of 311 subjects to confirm structure and test the reliability and validity of the scale. The result indicated that the reliability and validity of the Chinese version AHS is high. The result also demonstrated the construct of Chinese thinking style have some resemblances and differences to the theory proposed by Nisbett. The resemblance is the four dimension of Chinese thinking style. The differences is the relationship between the dimensions of change and the three others, In thinking style, Change was negatively related to contradiction and attention and no significant related to causality. It suggested that for Chinese the stronger the tendency to attention to whole and dialecticism, the lower the strength of change. The result supported Hou's research conclusion.In part two, we used 141 subjects to research the impact of thinking style on attribution and judgment of responsibility. The result revealed the impact of attention dimension on attribution tendency occurred on the part of external attribution. It clarified the debates on the particular effects of culture on attribution tendency. Thinking style influenced the stability of attribution by way of different modes. For the controllability of attribution, the influence brought by thinking style was no significant. But in the part of judgment of responsibility, we applied the path analysis model to confirm that the influence of attention dimension on judgment of responsibility was indirect through by external attribution. In addition, the controllability of attribution took on the completed mediated effects on the relationship between controllability of attribution and judgment of responsibility.The study first revised the Chinese version of AHS for the future thinking style research to provide an effective tools. Moreover, the study probe into the effect of culture on attribution of responsibility from the perspective of thinking style, and established the impact mechanism of thinking style on attribution of responsibility. These are the innovation and significance of this article.