A Whole New Mind: Empathy

If you're new here, you may want to learn what this site is about or check out the most popular articles. If you like what you see, make sure to sign up for email updates or subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Today we’ll be discussing A Whole New Mind’s take on empathy. Empathy is the ability to put yourself in the shoes of another and understand how they feel. It requires one to look beyond themselves. I like how Dan describes empathy:

Empathy allows us to see the other side of an argument, comfort someone in distress, and bite our lip instead of muttering something snide. Empathy builds self-awareness [and]… allows us to work together.

How does empathy apply to law? The legal field is a people field. Everything you do in law requires empathy. When you’re before a judge or jury, the ability to understand how they think or feel about things will assist you in persuading them to your side. When you sit down and negotiate a business deal or try to mediate a divorce, empathy and people skills are essential.

I think it’s hard for law students to understand the importance of empathy in law. We just see law in the abstract. We read cases, extract law, and that’s that. For me, I often forget that the case involves real people.

So, how can you improve your sense of empathy? Here’s what the book suggests.

1. Take acting classes. Acting is empathizing. We often hear how an actor has to “get into character.” It means the actor has to look beyond themselves and try to discover how their character would act in different situations. It’s a difficult skill to master, but the lessons learned from acting classes will surely help anybody with the ability to empathize. Acting classes can also help with public speaking, a vital skill in litigation.
2. Volunteer. Volunteering forces you to interact with people who aren’t like you. By helping people with your problems, you can develop your ability to empathize.
3. Take emotional quotient tests. Ivillage has a nice test so you can see how your emotional IQ stands.

My own suggestion for developing empathy in law school.

• Get to know the people in your casebook. As mentioned above, I have the problem of overlooking that real people are the characters in my case book. As a way to counteract this, I’ll Google the plaintiff’s or defendant’s name. Often I can come up with a picture of the individual and a news story to go along with it. It’s a nice way to personalize what I’m reading and get beyond the purely analytic nature of the case law method.

Tags:

Why not subscribe? Here's what you're missing out on!

• A Whole New Mind: Wrap-up
• Book Review: A Whole New Mind
• 4 Things To Do When You Don’t Want To Do Anything

4 Comments

1. Quang on 14.02.2007 at 17:12 (Reply)

   Empathy… nice, How come I have a feeling that Empathy is a really import skill/subject, yet know one talks about it, or gives it the time it deserves. Great Topic. Thanks

2. The Frugal Law Student on 15.02.2007 at 03:59 (Reply)

   Quang-
   Very true and that’s one of the points of the book. These things aren’t emphasized in school or work, but will soon be essential if one wishes to have success in life.

3. Tim Worstall on 16.02.2007 at 10:02 (Reply)

   Interesting that you look at those emotional intelligence tests. There’s also a series from Simon Baron Cohen (an autism researcher at Cambridge University) called the EQSQ tests. His basic theory is that there is a spectrum of innate qualities in the brain, some people being highly empathic, others being more systemizing. They’re here:
   http://www.eqsq.com/eqsqtest.php
   They can be used in two ways. One, to see what your own brain type already is or the way some use them, to see which aptitudes you need to brush up on, which you need to improve with training.

4. The Frugal Law Student on 16.02.2007 at 13:42 (Reply)

   Tim-
   Thanks for the link and thanks for stopping by. I’ll have to check out those tests.

Leave a comment