description
The purpose of this paper is to examine attribution theory in application to intercultural communication and its particular importance with regard to intercultural understanding and avoidance of conflict. This analysis will have three main goals: first, to examine how negative attribution can adversely affect relations, second, to show how positive empathic attribution can engender positive pro-social relations between people of varying cultures, and finally, to caution against collective ethnocentric blindness to (the capacity for) error in either the negative or positive direction.