Law School Psychology

I've been working my way through Ward Farnsworth's The Legal Analyst for the last couple of weeks and have been enjoying it a lot. Especially when I got to the section on psychology. I'm a big fan of blogs like You Are Not So Smart that talk about the biases that are inherent in everyday thinking. And I've been very, very slowly making my way through Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, which covers some of the same ground, but much more in-depth. The point being: learning about this stuff is freaking fascinating.

So I was really excited to see a section dedicated to exploring some of the ways these cognitive biases influence how law is practiced. Farnsworth does a great job talking about a few different examples of those biases in the law: anchoring, the endowment effect, hindsight bias, the framing effect, and of particular interest to an incoming law student like myself, self-serving/optimism bias.

So, this last one seems pretty applicable to the discussion of incoming 1Ls like myself. Incoming law students are derided a lot for their misguided optimism about job prospects and how well they'll do while in law school, and there's been a huge wave of websites/articles whose sole purpose is to crush that optimism, trying to get the message across that law school is a bad idea for most people. I think most people set on law school must kind of imagine it like those weird statues in Labyrinth that attempt to dissuade adventurers from their true path. FOOLISH 0LS, RETURN FROM WHENCE YE CAME. ONLY PAIN AWAITS YOU IN LAW SCHOOL. Yeah, whatever, statues. I'm on my way to a fancy legal career.

But what about the students already in law school? Are they better served by realistically evaluating their slim chances at being at the top of the class, or by going in expecting that they'll blow everyone out of the water with their sparkling legal insights? I was talking to my mom the other day, and she told me I wasn't allowed to get anything less than an A while in law school. "Uh, I don't think you understand how law school works," I said. "I'm pretty sure I'd be lucky to get any As, even if I was doing really well." But maybe I'm being too realistic. Wouldn't I be better served going in with the highest expectations of myself?

(Semi-related sidenote: some law schools have adopted alternatives to the letter grading system that appear to have been put into place solely to preserve students' sense of self-worth. See Harvard's grading policy.)

In this article on the relationship between hope, optimism, and law school performance, the author reports that a study that measured hope and optimism at the beginning of 1L year shows that hope has a better correlation with law school GPA than does the LSAT. Whoa. Optimism didn't have that same correlation with GPA, though it did correlate with satisfaction with life. The way the two terms are described in the article is as follows:


"Optimism is the expectation that the future will be good, regardless of how this happens," said Kevin Rand, an assistant professor of psychology at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. "Hope is the expectation about things you have actual control over." 

Okay, so hope having positive expectations of yourself, and optimism is just thinking things are going to work out fine. Got it. That makes sense; you do have to do something to get good results rather than just expecting them. But oddly, this is also in the article:


...but research specific to law school has found that pessimism, or a "healthy skepticism," actually predicted academic success. 


So which is it? Pessimism or hope? Are they mutually exclusive? I'm not really sure how these findings fit together. I'd like to think that I can be hopeful and still exercise healthy skepticism, but "pessimism" seems to imply something more than just skepticism.

related link:

"Except in One Career, Our Brains Seem Built for Optimism." article from the WSJ that brings up the issue of pessimism and law school success.