Cognitive Style of Law Students: Prosecution and Defense

Abstract

Differences in psychological differentiation have been established both between and within professions (2). Occupations involving analytic and impersonal tasks tend to attract people whose cognitive style is more field-independent, while occupations requiring a more personal approach to people tend to attract those who are relatively more field-dependent. The former group are defined in terms of their capacity to isolate discrete elements within an experience. The latter group are defined in terms of their global, humanistic perceptions. These stable personality traits reflect life experiences and affect career choice. It is likely that differences in psychological differentiation may exist within the law profession; for example, between lawyers in the more analytic and impersonal areas of constitutional, administrative, corporation, and property law, and those in the more personal areas of family and criminal law. A more subtle test of this difference can be made within the area of criminal law, where it may be hypothesized that prosecurion lawyers are likely to be more field-independent than defense lawyers. In many criminal court cases the task of the prosecuting lawyer may be characterized as analytically disembedding the criminal action from its contextual milieu so the defendant may assume individual responsibility for the action. On the other hand, the task of the defense lawyer is often ro diminish individual responsibility by demonstrating that the criminal action can only be assessed globally in terms of the contextual milieu. These tasks parallel the field-independence/dependence continuum and hence should be reflected in the cognitive styles of lawyers who prefer careers in the prosecution or defense areas. Thirty volunteer final-year law students at the University of Auckland first indicated whether their preferences would be for the prosecution or defense stance in a criminal court career. Prosecurion was preferred by 13 students (7 women) while defense was preferred by 17 students (10 women). Students then completed the Hidden Figures Test (2), a very difficult measure of psychological differentiation requiring the disembedding of a geometric pattern from a complex stimulus. Numbers correct on the Hidden Figures Test were analyzed in a 2 (law preference) X 2 (sex) analysis of variance. Only law preference was significant (K.11 = 5.41, p < .05). Law students with a preference for prosecution were more field-independent (M = 16.77, SD = 6.51) than those with a preference for defense (M = 11.29, SD =