OUR DISPOSITION + THE SITUATION USUALLY INFLUENCE OUR CHOICES ---Episode 1

                       DISPOSITIONISTS AND SITUATIONISTS
                { Their Influence on Public Policy and Law }
    
    There is a real, meaningful divide in America --- a great rift that extends across debates. As we are about to explore, the divide is based on two attributional approaches : the dispositionist approach , which explains outcomes and behavior with reference to people's dispositions {that is, personalities, preferences, and the like} and situationist approach, which bases attributions of causation and responsibility on unseen (though often visible) influences within us and around us. Those different methods of constructing causal stories and assigning fault not only color individual issues from gay marriage to welfare and from abortion to social security reform, but also help define the walls of the broader liberal--conservative crevasse. 
   Marking out the contours of the crevasse is especially important because law is centrally concerned with making attributions.  At its foundation, most law seeks to answer three central questions : (1) What caused an outcome ?; (2) Who or what was responsible ? ; and (3) Is anyone to blame ? A legal education trains students in the categories and distinctions of law that help sort out what counts as a harm and what fines, punishments, rewards, and compensations people should receive based on those attributions in different settings.  Moreover, attributions matter to legal scholars and lawmakers because if legal policy prescriptions are based on the wrong attributions, they are unlikely to solve the problems that they are designed to address, and, indeed, may make matters worse. Thus, lawmakers and legal theorists should be, and often are, very concerned with determining if certain attributions are more likely to be correct, and, if so, which attributions those are. 
   As it happens, social scientists have been working hard on those very questions for many decades and have come to some surprising conclusions. Nonetheless, their research has yet to be thoroughly taken up by legal academics. 
   What social scientists have discovered is that, far from being neutral processors of information, we humans are subject to significant attributional biases. We tend to rely heavily on familiar stories of thinking, preferring, willing, and choosing to explain human actions. Do you want to know what made America great ? Easy : people with the most American of character traits, rugged individualism and self-reliance. Do you want to know what is "poisoning" America ? Again, easy : not "impersonal forces beyond anyone's control" but "specific individuals" with bad dispositions. In spite of the prevalence and strong appeal of those notions, however, we are actually moved significantly more by our situations ---unseen or under-appreciated elements in our environment and within our interiors --- than we are by disposition-based choice. 
   That dispositionalism is a significantly more inaccurate attributional approach than situationalism may seem to be a controversial claim. However, were social science our guide, it would not be. Just one feature of the tendency we are focusing on is so fundamental to our attributional proclivities that it has actually been dubbed the "fundamental attribution error" by social psychologists. That error --- the tendency to attribute to the person what is often the consequence of the person's exterior situation --- has been fully researched, tested, and documented, and (although there are well-documented exceptions to it) it remains the most settled of psychological insights. 
   Thus, situationist accounts ---- those that, for instance, suggest that people tend to file for bankruptcy because of lost jobs, divorce, or unforeseen medical costs---tend to hold more promise for being correct than dispositionist accounts --- those that, for example, assert that bankruptcies are the result of character flaws. Unfortunately, just like everything else, our attributional tendencies are situationally-dependent, and for most of us (some of us more than others), our situations lead us toward dispositionism. 
   An apt metaphor for this tendency can be found in the old joke about the drunk who loses his keys in a distant field but searches under a lamppost because the light is better. Social scientists have shown that we humans tend to make our behavioral attributions under the lamppost of dispositionism when the key to our behavior is to be found in the dark field of situation. 
   I want to consider the familiar liberal/conservative divide that is  explicit in most of our policy debates and suggest that, in significant part, it reflects the less familiar situationist/dispositionist rift. That analysis leads to the conclusion that we ought to encourage policymakers to rely more heavily on situationist advisers and adopt additional measures to strengthen situationism in broader society. 

     Arguments NOT Being Made and NOT Being Endorsed 

(1) I'm not claiming that situationism leads directly to the truth and dispositionism directly away from it. Clearly, if a situationist approach were to focus on the wrong situational factors or to give too great or too little weight to the correct situational factors, such a model would be inaccurate. The point is that dispositionism, by itself, is almost certainly going to lead us astray. Any hope of making accurate causal attributions lies in taking situation seriously. Situationism is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for making accurate causal attributions. 

(2) The claim about the inaccuracy of dispositionism is about the correctness of attributions ( "People are poor because they are lazy") not about the correctness of their beliefs ("I don't believe the government should help poor people"). The implication of this missive is that beliefs based on incorrect attributions ought to be reconsidered, but I'm not taking a position on whether it is "right" or "wrong" to, for example, believe that each person should take care of himself and not be forced to assist others. 

(3) I am not asserting that dispositionism is without value or influence. Dispositionism, even if inaccurate, can be a simple, time-saving, affirming, psychic-cost-minimizing approach. It can be useful as a means of predicting and influencing those with whom we interact. And it may be quite valuable as a means of 
encouraging individuals to make the most of their situations. A strong belief in the power of individuals to succeed through good choices, hard work, and personal responsibility has undoubtedly helped many individuals born into impoverished environments to achieve wealth and power, from Oprah Winfrey to former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. In addition, dispositionist attributions, self-concepts, and narratives can themselves have a powerful, often self-fulfilling, impact on people's behavior even if the perceived disposition is just imagined. 

(4) I am not suggesting that there are just two kinds of people in the world ---situationists and dispositionists--- and that situationists are smart and "get it" and that dispositionists are stupid and "miss it."  We are all basically dispositionists, and we all sometimes make situationist attributions. The important question to be examined concerns the extent of our dispositionism : how low or high is our threshold to situationism and how much of the situation do we see ? Where we fit along the attributional spectrum is itself situational and, thus, generally beyond our conscious awareness and control. 

(5) The argument ultimately turns on the reasons that we make particular types of attributions as much or more than it does on the types of attributions we make. As we'll see, there are many factrs that contribute to the ubiquity of dispositionism --- including numerous subconscious motivations --- and it is those factors that are the real source of inaccuracy. In certain circumstances, those factors can actually encourage situationist attributions, and in such cases, the attributions are no more reliable or accurate than dispositionist attributions. 

(6) Finally, I'm not claiming that the human animal is without agency --- the ability to influence his or her own behavior toward some ends. Rather, my claim is that situational forces around us and in us are far more influential than we generally recognize and that human agency is different in kind and in significance from what is generally presumed.