Journal article
The Great Attributional Divide: How Divergent Views of Human Behavior are Shaping Legal Policy
Emory law journal, Vol.57(2)
22 Mar 2008
Abstract
There is a real, meaningful divide in America-a great rift that extends across debates. As we explore in this Article, the divide is based on two attributional approaches: the dispositionist approach, which explains outcomes and behavior with reference to people's dispositions (i.e., personalities, preferences, and the like), and the situationist approach, which bases attributions of causation and responsibility on unseen or unappreciated 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 its contours is vitally 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 whether 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, and one purpose of the critical realist project, of which this Article is a component, is to encourage and expedite this process.
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Details
- Title
- The Great Attributional Divide: How Divergent Views of Human Behavior are Shaping Legal Policy
- Creators
- Adam BenforadoJon Hanson
- Publication Details
- Emory law journal, Vol.57(2)
- Publisher
- Emory University, School of Law
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Thomas R. Kline School of Law
- Identifiers
- 991020202226704721