OUR DISPOSITION + THE SITUATION USUALLY INFLUENCE OUR CHOICES ----Episode 5

ATTRIBUTIONAL TENDENCIES UNDERLYING THE 
LIBERAL--- CONSERVATIVE DUALITY


Using labels : Liberal and Conservative 

   Given the variability of dispositionism and our great reliance on schemas, it is unsurprising that we humans commonly employ labels to categorize relatively dispositionist and relatively situationist individuals, approaches, institutions, movements, and societies. The most significant (and, for many, chronically activated) of those schemas is the liberal / conservative bipolarity, which Americans routinely employ to explain, predict, and understand a range of subjects including our policies, our history, ourselves, and others. This left / right dichotomy has found resonance in almost every cultural context in which it has been introduced. 
    This section argues that a major part of what it means to call a person "liberal"is to designate that individual as relatively sensitive to situation. And, conversely, the label "conservative" is often meant to designate a person as relatively dispositionist. Again, the point is not to suggest that people neatly fit into one of two categories.  The point is that those referred to as liberals tend to be relatively situationist, but are often still rather strong dispositionists. Thus, it is about a spectrum based on recognition of the power of situation, openness to ambiguity, and a host of other factors. Moreover, I should reiterate that being a situationist is only a necessary condition, not a sufficient one, for accurate attributions. Liberals, in as much as they have come closer to meeting that condition and are looking for the hard-to-see and less-affirming role of situation, stand a better chance, other things equal, of more closely approaching the truth in explaining behavior. 
   Although the correspondence between attributional tendencies and these ideological labels is not widely perceived (owing largely to the fact that people generally fail to cognize attributional styles as such), it is nonetheless quite strong. Social psychologists have shown that political world views do correlate with attributional styles. Two of my favorites social psychologists, Gail Zucker and Bernard Weiner, for instance, have found that "[C]onservatives generally rate individualistic (or dispositional) causes as being more important than do liberals who, in turn, rate societal and fatalistic (two types of external situationist) causes as being more important than do conservatives." 
   As Susan Fiske (2004, p. 98) explains, summarizing the relevant literature : 

   Conservatives tend to believe that people are poor because they are lazy, do not improve themselves, cannot manage money, and abuse drugs or alcohol. Less conservative beliefs correlate with situational attributions : perceiving societal causes, feeling pity, and intending to help. In this view, people are poor because of prejudice and discrimination, inadequate education, exploitation by the rich, and low wages. The conservative dispositional attributions imply that poor people have a controllable predisposition to stay poor. 


   Relatedly, conservatives tend to be less sympathetic to and less willing to help individuals harmed by everything from natural disasters to low income, in part because they tend to attribute the suffering to the victims' faulty dispositions.