Joan Miller (1984) has shown that Hindus are more likely than Americans to explain events in terms of situational or contextual factors. As noted in Chapter 5 (where we discussed only the results for American subjects), Miller asked her subjects to describe, and then to account for, “good” or “wrong” things that someone they knew well had recently done. Their explanations were coded into broad categories of which the most relevant, in terms of our concerns, were those corresponding to general dispositions (for example, “generosity” or “clumsiness”) versus context (for example, “there was no
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