THE GREAT ATTRIBUTIONAL DIVIDE: HOW DIVERGENT VIEWS OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR ARE SHAPING LEGAL POLICY

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. Again, easy: not "impersonal forces beyond anyone's control" but "specific individuals" with bad dispositions.7 In spite of the prevalence and strong appeal of those notions, however, we humans are actually moved significantly more by our situations-unseen or underappreciated elements in our environment and within our interiors-than we are by disposition-based choice.8 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.9 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. Of course, the continued existence of those elements is in no way assured and the vulnerability of those institutions as fertile grounds for situationism is well-referenced in recent history, a topic that we take up in other work, including Legal Academic Backlash.361 To the extent that the press, academia, and the judiciary fail to withstand inroads by the dispositionism dominant in American society as a whole, we can expect significant societal costs as more and more vital decisions for the future of our country are made based on incorrect attributions of causation, responsibility, and blame.