Two Situationism Articles on SSRN
"The Great Attributional Divide: How Divergent Views of Human Behavior are Shaping Legal Policy" 
Emory Law Journal, Vol. 57, 2008
ADAM BENFORADO, Affiliation Unknown
JON D. HANSON, Harvard University - Harvard Law School
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.
"Naïve Cynicism: Maintaining False Perceptions in Policy Debates"
ADAM BENFORADO, Affiliation Unknown
JON D. HANSON, Harvard University - Harvard Law School
This is the second article in a multi-part series. In the first part, The Great Attributional Divide, the authors suggested that a major rift runs across many of our major policy debates based on contrasting attributional tendencies (dispositionist and situationist). This article explores how dispositionism maintains its dominance despite the fact that it misses so much of what actually moves us. It argues that the answer lies in a subordinate dynamic and discourse, naïve cynicism: the basic subconscious mechanism by which dispositionists discredit and dismiss situationist insights and their proponents. Without it, the dominant person schema - dispositionism - would be far more vulnerable to challenge and change, and the more accurate person schema - situationism - less easily and effectively attacked. Naïve cynicism is thus critically important to explaining how and why certain legal policies manage to carry the day.
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