Academic

Benforado & Hanson on Situationalism

By Lawrence Solum

Adam Benforado and Jon D. Hanson (Harvard Law School) have posted The Great Attributional Divide: How Divergent Views of Human Behavior are Shaping Legal Policy (Emory Law Journal, Vol. 57, 2008) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

This article, the first of a multipart series, argues that a major rift runs across many of our major policy debates based on our attributional tendencies: the less accurate dispositionist approach, which explains outcomes and behavior with reference to people's dispositions (i.e., personalities, preferences, and the like), and the more accurate situationist approach, which bases attributions of causation and responsibility on unseen influences within us and around us. Given that situationism offers a truer picture of our world than the alternative, and given that attributional tendencies are largely the result of elements in our situations, identifying the relevant elements should be a major priority of legal scholars. With such information, legal academics could predict which individuals, institutions, and societies are most likely to produce situationist ideas¿in other words, which have the greatest potential for developing the accurate attributions of human behavior that are so important to law.

A good introduction.  I have grave doubts about the situationalist program based on extensive reading of the underlying social psychology literature, but this is interesting work and this paper is certainly recommended.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on April 07, 2008 (boomark / email).