OUR DISPOSITION + THE SITUATION USUALLY INFLUENCE OUR CHOICES----Episode 6

                                                          SUMMING UP

   Three main arguments have been advanced. First, stretching across and defining most policy debates, there is a gaping divide arising from two fundamentally different ways of explaining behavior and events. That is, beneath the surface of most law-related discussions, there are two conflicting and competing attributional presumptions : dispositionism and situationism. Second, for a variety of reasons that have been mentioned, dispositionism is the default attributional outlook for most Americans, despite the fact that situationism is the more accurate presumption. Finally, the familiar liberal / conservative divide that is so prominent in policy discourse is loosely the same as (and largely explained by) the less familiar situationist / disositionist divide that we have identified. 
   Taken together, these arguments shed new light on concepts and categories that have been largely ignored in the legal-academic research, but that have been extremely important in the real world of policy attitudes and policymaking. Almost every major policy debate today is defined and animated by the great attributional divide. Even a policy concern as broad as poverty --- which, in Katrina's wake, was, at least briefly, placed back at the center of the policymaking map---has long reflected this attributional rivalry.
   On the one hand, there is nothing new about dispositionalizing poverty, although modern commentators often employ similar reasoning. Comedian Bill Cosby, in speech at a 2004 NAACP ceremony, lambasted poor African Americans for not taking responsibility for their lives and for being bad parents. Similarly, journalist Michelle Singletary (2005) solicited comments from the public about the causes of poverty and recorded nearly identical sentiments : 

* "We would live in a much better world if people pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps instead of waiting for a handout. "

* "Bottom line, most people are poor because they choose to be poor. They choose to buy a new car instead of buying a used car and investing the difference. They choose to buy new clothes instead of shopping at thrift stores (as I do) and investing the difference." 

* Many poor, of all colors, are where they are because they are foolish with their money, integrity and philosophy." 

   On the other hand, there is the harder-to-grasp situationist account, which sees poverty more as a cause, than as a symptom, of individual "choice." By stating that poverty is a form of "violence," for example, Gandhi was flipping the attributional default and urging people to look at poverty as a situational cause. That was also President Johnson's (1965) message in his famous "We Shall Overcome Speech" : 

   This great, rich, restless country can offer opportunity and education and hope to all : black and white, North and South, sharecropper and city dweller. These are the enemies : poverty, ignorance, disease. They are our enemies, not our fellow man, not our neighbor. And these enemies too, poverty, disease, and ignorance, we shall overcome.