Cognitive Styles in Law Schools [1 ed.] 9781477304990, 9780292741775

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COGNITIVE STYLES IN LAW SCHOOLS

Cognitive Styles in Law Schools by Alfred G. Smith Patrick A. Nester & Lynn H. Pulford, Research Associates

University of Texas Press Austin

All of the materials incorporated in this work were developed with the financial support of the National Science Foundation, Grant 74-18187 . The manuscript of the final report of that grant, "Cognitive Style: Monopaths and Polypaths in Law Schools," which was submitted to the NSF in December 1977, is an early draft of this book.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Smith, Alfred Goud, 1921Cognitive styles in law schools. Bibliography: p. Includes index. I. Law-Study and teaching-United States. 2 . Cognitive styles-United States. I. Title. KF272·S58 340'.07'1173 ISBN 0-292-710504-2

78-12521

Copyright © 1979 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved

Contents

Acknowledgments xi Problems of Cognitive Styles 1. Cognitive Styles 3 2. Methodology 10 Tests of Cognitive Styles 3. Legalism 29 4. Intolerance of Ambiguity 37 5. Authoritarianism 44 6. Opportunism 52 Corollary Tests and Analyses 7. Anxiety 63 8. Cognitive Self-image 68 9. Problem Solving 83 10. Differences among Law Schools 90 11. Cognitive Styles of Law Professors 106 Categories, Consequences, and Conclusions 12. Categories of Cognitive Styles 113 13. Other Variables and Cognitive Styles 124 14. Conclusions 128 Appendix 1. Research Questionnaire 135 Appendix 2. Oral Solution of Verbal Problems 148

Appendix 3. Authorization Statement A 159 Appendix 4. Authorization Statement Β 160 Bibliography 161 Index 169

Tables

3.1. Correlations between Legalism and Other Tests 35 4.1. Correlations between Intolerance of Ambiguity and Other Tests 42 5.1. Correlations between Authoritarianism and Other Tests 49 6.1. Correlations between Opportunism and Other Tests 59 7.1. Correlations between Anxiety and Other Tests 66 8.1. Means of Discrepant Scores on Cognitive Self-image Tests 73 8.2. Correlations between Cognitive Self-image Tests and Other Tests 81 10.1. Mean Scores on All Tests by Law Schools 98 11.1. Law Professors' Mean Scores and Standard Deviations on Four Tests 107 12.1. Distribution of Scores on Each Test 114 12.2. Correlations among Scores on All Tests 116 12.3. Authoritarianism Test Items Loading on Factor 1: Means and Standard Deviations 119 12.4. Intolerance-of-Ambiguity Test Items Loading on Factor 1: Means and Standard Deviations 119 12.5. Composition of Factors 122

Figures

3.1. Scores on Legalism Test 33 4.1. Scores on Intolerance-of-Ambiguity Test 42 5.1. Scores on Authoritarianism Test 49 6.1.

Scores on Opportunism Test 59

7.1. Scores on Anxiety Test 66 8.1. Cognitive Self-Image Test: Law Students Compared to Lawyers 74 8.2. Cognitive Self-Image Test: Law Students Compared to Peers 76 8.3. Cognitive Self-image Test: Peers Compared to Lawyers 77 8.4.

Cognitive Self-image Test: Comparison of Law Students to Lawyers, Law Students to Peers, and Peers to Lawyers 79

10.1. Comparison of Twenty Law Schools by Torts Grades 92 10.2. Comparison of Twenty Law Schools by Authoritarianism Scores 93 10.3. Comparison of Twenty Law Schools by Legalism Scores 95 10.4. Comparison of Twenty Law Schools by Opportunism Scores 96

10.5. Comparison of Twenty Law Schools by Intoleranceof-Ambiguity Scores 97 10.6. Comparison of Twenty Law Schools by "Most Lawyers" minus "You": Cognitive Self-image Test 102 10.7. Comparison of Twenty Law Schools by "Most Law Students" minus "You": Cognitive Self-Image Test 103

Acknowledgments

We are deeply indebted to all the professors of torts courses at law schools throughout the United States, and to their students, who allowed us to take their time, who submitted to our batteries of tests, and who opened their thinking to us. These students and professors were invariably generous and gracious. It was a pleasure to work with them and we are most appreciative. We gladly thank Walter Probert, who was the director of the Law and Social Sciences program of the National Science Foundation when this study was launched. His advice and assistance were as stimulating as his own important explorations which he presented so challengingly in his Law, Language and Communication. It is our delight to acknowledge the great help of Eui Bun Lee, whose doctoral dissertation, Communication and Cognition: Differences among Students in Journalism, Law, and Business, was partly supported by this study. Dr. Lee worked with great conscientiousness, ability, and cheerfulness reviewing and revising our statistics and computations. Carolyn E. Carter, whose master's thesis was partly supported by this study, was most helpful in the early stages of the study. Equally diligent and congenial was John F. Leahy, Jr., graduate student in art history. Robert F. Watkins was outstanding among the undergraduate students who gave temporary and part-time help. Magdalena Rood, graduate student in educational psychology, was of great help in organizing and evaluating our data on problem solving. W. Wade Dorman, graduate student in

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Acknowledgments

English and technical writer, provided much appreciated assistance in reviewing a preliminary draft of the study. It was a pleasure to work with John H. Kyle, Barbara L. Burnham, and Carolyn Cates Wylie of the University of Texas Press. They were most impressively professional. Fred Whitehead created the graphics, which speak for themselves. Thanking Allen E. Smith is a happy obligation. As a partner and senior consultant he provided the perspective of the legal educator. He helped formulate the approach to the legal mind and to the grant from the National Science Foundation. He was the Mr. and Mrs. Hines H. Baker Professor in Law at the University of Texas at Austin at the beginning of this study, before he became Dean of the School of Law at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Based on his own intimate involvement with legal education, Patrick A. Nester brought to this study a sensitive understanding of the law school experience. He earned his law degree while working on this study, even taking a term off to administer the tests at seventeen law schools from Pennsylvania to California. He realized what the questions meant to the students and what their answers expressed, over and above the measures of the formal research design. He is now with the State Bar of Texas. Lynn H. Pulford did the basic electronic data processing. He was a computer programmer in industry, and he earned his Ph.D. in journalism while processing these data through the computer and advising us on the alternative programs that were available. We owe a special measure of gratitude to Mrs. Janis Marshall Sharp. Officially she was the administrative secretary. In fact she was the universal facilitator. She was the office manager, personnel manager, and bookkeeper. She kept track of everything and everything on track, all with a smile. We are most grateful.

PROBLEMS OF COGNITIVE STYLES

Chapter 1 Cognitive Styles

Information processing is the vital center of communication. The sending and receiving of messages depends on eliciting information, analyzing and synthesizing it, coding it, storing and retrieving it. The lawyer listening and talking in the courtroom is processing information and communicating. The surgeon alone at a desk studying the X-ray is doing the same. By and large we do not know how we do these things in human communication. Our information processing is shrouded in a haze. It is a mystery we practice but do not understand. The information and the processing are Siamese twins that can hardly be separated. The information we use and the way we use it reflect and echo one another. And one person does not use the same information as another, or in the same way. Different people see different worlds, and they look at things differently. One sees permanence where another sees changes. The difference is as much a matter of how we see as of what is seen. It is a matter of beauty being in the eye of the beholder; so are ugliness, reasonableness, opportunity, heresy, liberality, and even the eye of the beholder itself. We see vagueness or clarity not because the world is one rather than the other, but because we look for one rather the other. Darwin saw similarities where Linnaeus saw differences because he had a different eye. The opposite is also true,· that is, the world gives us the information we need and tells us how to process it. The experience of a lifetime and the collective learning of the human race have taught the surgeon, the lawyer, and the naturalist what to look for. Yet life sends us different kinds of feedforward and

4 Problems of Cognitive Styles feedback-sometimes this, and sometimes that, and sometimes we even get to choose. It leads some of us to look for order and others for chaos, some for moral necessities and others for pragmatic alternatives. The way of the world and the way we look at it are two sides of the same window. When two people read the events around them differently we often regard that to be a difference in values, beliefs, and interests. A surgeon regards an injury one way, a lawyer another. There were comparable differences between Jefferson and Hamilton. One valued individual liberty, while the other believed in national efficiency. When we credit these differences to values, beliefs, and interests, we generally think of things rather than processes. We think of what we value or find interesting, such as money. We are less likely to think of our way of valuing or of being interested. Sometimes we also regard such differences as those between Jefferson and Hamilton as a matter of attitudes. When we try to grasp what an attitude is, however, we find it can be quite slippery. One of its ingredients is probably liking or disliking something, and a second ingredient is knowing and understanding that thing, apprehending and comprehending it. The second is the cognitive ingredient. The difference between the way and the thing, the process and the product, between seeing and what is seen, is a delicate one. They can hardly be separated. Yet one person sees a glass as half empty while another sees the same glass as half full. We can risk the assumption that the difference is as much in the way they look at it as in what they look at. We may be able to separate one from the other. Let us parlay this risk by proposing that there are differences, not just in perceiving this glass of water or that injury, but in the general way people look at the world. There are some general approaches that permeate many perceptions, and these approaches may differ from person to person and group to group. The differences between Jefferson and Hamilton are broader than their views of voting rights,· Darwin and Linnaeus differ more fundamentally than on just the kinship between humans and monkeys. They differ in some persistent and per-

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vasive approaches to the world. Let us consider these differences between seeing order and chaos, or glasses half empty and half full, as differences in cognitive style. Different people approach information in different ways. While some people are methodical others are makeshift; some are expedient while others are exploratory. What is significant for some is insignificant for others. These differences in cognitive style are different habits of getting and using information for solving problems, for making decisions, and for the vaguer formless doings of everyday life. Many researchers, mostly psychologists, have studied cognitive style in one way or another. We can consider Piaget's studies (1926; 1929) of the perceptual development of children as descriptions of successive styles of cognition. Witkin (1973,· Witkin and Oltman 1967) tilted the chairs on which his subjects sat and also the rooms they were in. He then asked them to return their chairs to an upright position. Some adjusted them independently of the room's position and others not. Thus one cognitive style is field independent while another is field dependent. These psychologists emphasize differences in perceptions of the physical world. The present study is more concerned with different algorithms of analyzing social situations and of solving human problems. More particularly it is proposed here that two styles of information processing are the monopathic and the polypathic. The monopathic follows a single route of established principles and procedures. This approach assumes there is a correct way to get facts, to sort and interpret them, and to apply them. The polypathic style takes many routes, wherever the information itself and the circumstances at the time may suggest. For example, the true believer is a monopath, while a wheelerdealer is a polypath. Before looking at these styles more closely, we should recegnize briefly some of the limits of this proposal. Monopath and polypath are abstractions that ignore many other facets of information processing. There are many other dimensions of cognitive style; monopath and polypath are simply points of departure in this study. They are heuristic abstractions that let

6 Problems of Cognitive Styles us focus on one aspect of behavior. They let us see by making us half blind. The test of their soundness is whether they are fruitful (Smith 1973). Monopath and polypath are also deliberately ambiguous. For any classification or category to be successful in the behavioral sciences it probably has to be ambiguous (Smith 1964; 1977). In one sense a path is a way, a trail we can follow; in another sense, Greek rather than Germanic, a path is suffering a disease, as a psychopath suffers a mental illness. The terms monopath and polypath are designed to imply that they are pathological when taken to extremes. We cannot say that people simply are monopathic or polypathic. These abstractions provide a scale on which we can locate approaches to problems, decisions, and the general management of information. We assume that everyone uses both styles. Some people use one more than the other; and, among people who use the same style, some use it more fully and vigorously than others do. It is also a matter of how they interact with the world. Different situations lead people to interact differently and deal with data differently. The idea of a natural continuum of interactions prevents sharp distinctions between the normal and the deviant, the primitive and the civilized (Smith 1972). The monopath thinks the world is one thing, while the polypath thinks it is another. In each case their picture of the world goes hand in hand with the way they process information about it. For the monopath this is a one-possibility world, fundamentally unambiguous and changeless. For the polypath the world has many possibilities, all of them ambiguous and ever changing. The monopath pictures the world as a uni-verse. It is a uniform order governed by one set of natural laws. This is the world of Galileo and Newton, governed by the laws of motion. It is the world of Kant and Hegel, governed by the moral law and the universal dialectic. The polypath, on the other hand, pictures the world filled with possibilities and diversities, with caprice and disorder. This is the world of Montaigne and Shakespeare, who were "content with confusion." It is also

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Heisenberg's world of uncertainty and Kafka's world of absurdity. The monopathic world is orderly. Things are neat and clear. They are well defined, certain, black and white. It is the Platonic world, and the world of Euclid, Calvin, and Billy Graham. Piet Mondrian painted it. The polypathic world is fuzzy. Everything in it is ambiguous and subject to a hundred different interpretations. It is the pragmatic world of Clarence Darrow. It was painted by Jackson Pollock. The monopathic world, governed by a single set of rules, is predictable. Things do not change there. This is a stable, static, redundant world, with nothing new under the sun, the home of Ecclesiastes. It is a world you can trust. The polypathic world is unpredictable. It is changeable and dynamic. Nothing stands still, everything flows by. It is the home of Heraclitus. These two worlds, however broadly sketched, are complements of two methods of processing information. The monopathic method is clear, doctrinal, and variety reducing, while the polypathic method is indeterminate, improvisational, and variety generating. Monopathic information processing is predictable, like the monopathic world. It is clear, unequivocal, and decisive. This is a determinate machine like a sausage grinder. What comes out is what has gone in. The machine may be a computer program for handling statistical problems or it may be a research design. Practically all research papers in professional journals follow these predictable methods. Naturally, this mechanical approach to information is constrictive and not innovative, but it is safe. The monopaths regard the world with reverence and follow its rules,· the polypaths are irreverent free thinkers. The polypathic method is as indeterminate as its world is unpredictable. This method is much more organic and flexible, but it is also much more unreliable. Therefore the rate of rejection of scholarly papers submitted to professional journals is much higher if the papers use polypathic methods. Physical Review probably has a lower rejection rate than The New Yorker.

8 Problems of Cognitive Styles The monopathic methods are abstract and ideal. They follow rules of form and principles of doctrine. The polypathic methods grapple with information in a catch-as-catch-can, improvisational manner. The monopath takes a case history and fills out a long form, while the polypath engages in an open-ended interview. Overall the monopathic method is what cyberneticists call variety reducing, while the polypathic method is variety generating (Ashby 1956; Beer 1966). One organizes, systematizes, and generalizes, while the other explores the available highways and byways and also cuts across the open fields. One is a determinate machine, while the other has requisite variety. Monopaths take pride in being principled. They want to be dependable. It gives them integrity. Polypaths, on the other hand, doubt that their personal identity depends on the predictability of their conduct. They take pride in being versatile, flexible, and adaptable. When monopaths look at a polypath they see a superficial and unreliable con artist. When polypaths look at a monopath they see a hidebound, smug, and boring prig. The rest of this study is devoted to the more precise and empirical examination of this scale of information processing in law schools. Cognitive anthropologists have shown that some differences in information processing are cultural. A Texas rancher and a Chinese civil servant take different approaches, for example, in selecting and organizing information about family relations. One of the cornerstones of cognitive style is tradition. Every line of work is a kind of culture with its own strategies of understanding and communicating. Lawyers, anthropologists, journalists, and other tribes have each evolved their own habits of problem solving, decision making, and general coping. But tradition does not account for all differences in style. There are differences within each tradition and other differences that cut across traditional boundaries. Some anthropologists think like some lawyers. To study these styles can be to fish in muddy waters. People who are learning to think like lawyers form a good test population for the study of cognitive styles. They are

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learning to process information, and learning that one kind of processing is more successful than another, depending on the occasion (Smith 1969). Besides learning laws and decisions, and how institutions operate, these people have to develop "an analytic mind." That is their cognitive style. In law especially, there are many ways of being analytic and processing information. There are strict constructionists and also loose ones, conservatives and activists. In law it is also important to know the cognitive styles of adversaries. It is equally important in legal education to understand the cognitive styles of students. On the basis of their styles it may be possible to guide one student into law and another out of it, or guide them into one kind of practice rather than another. (This may also be true in other fields, such as advertising or engineering, of course.) We studied nearly eight hundred selected students in more than a score of selected law schools throughout the United States. We also studied their professors. We gave them a battery of tests, some old and well established like the intolerance-of-ambiguity test; other tests were specially designed for this study, pretested, and tested for validity and reliability, such as tests of legalism, opportunism, response consistency, problem solving, and cognitive self image. We were traditionally monopathic in our research methods. We calculated item analyses, factor analyses, analyses of variance and covariance, and multiple regressions. We sought reliability,· but we also sought alternatives. We believe that our methods of studying other people's methods of information processing do not lead to an infinite regress. In any case we have to start somewhere.

Chapter 2 Methodology

For this study we used two means of gathering data from law students and professors. The main data-gathering technique was a battery of tests of cognitive style and self-image. This included original tests of legalism and of opportunism, a standard test of intolerance of ambiguity, and a modified test of authoritarianism. As controls we used an original test of selfimage and a modified test of anxiety. Professors completed parts of these tests also. Professors' responses and students' responses were both studied as separate groups and compared. These data were then analyzed with a variety of statistical procedures, including factor analysis, multiple regression analysis, and discriminant analysis. As a supplementary line of investigation into cognitive style, a subsample of the original respondents verbally described their processes of solving problems. Some of these problems were similar to those found on Law School Admission Tests, and other problems were quite different. The verbal descriptions were categorized according to types of problem-solving processes. Questionnaire Design and Development Tests were designed and selected with the aim of determining whether there are differences in cognitive styles among law students and professors. If the responses to the questionnaires showed distinct patterns, this could partially confirm the hypothesis that there are distinct cognitive styles.

Methodology

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1. Development of a Research Paradigm In assembling and selecting the tests to be used, it was necessary to clarify the different cognitive and communicative styles that the respondents were supposed to display. The paradigm of this study takes the basic supposition that every person can be positioned on a spectrum of behavior styles. At one end of the spectrum is the rigid, authoritarian, closed-minded person who displays a narrow range of cognitive and communicative behaviors. At the other is the completely open, nonprincipled, anarchic person whose behavior is so varied as to be virtually random. This spectrum involves the number of alternatives that a person considers before selecting a course of action. At one end, a person considers only one alternative; behavior is almost reflexive. At the other end, there is no action because the person is locked into a perpetual, 360-degree scan of all alternatives, or action is eventually forthcoming but, over a large range of cases, displays no patterning or uniformity and tends toward randomness. We thought the extreme polar positions to be pathologies. Probably no one outside a mental hospital could be found to fit either extreme. We use the terms monopath and polypath for these polar categories. The mono signifies the unitary as opposed to the poly or multiple paths a person would consider before acting. The path also connotes that the tendency is abnormal when taken to extremes. 2. Anxiety as an Independent Indicator In addition to all other variables in the monopath-polypath paradigm, we also recognized that it is almost universal for law students to contend with anxiety, and this can affect their cognitive style. Anxiety probably affects some students beneficially and others adversely. Again, every respondent probably has a position at some point on a spectrum of anxiety. We included an anxiety test as a control on the other tests. High levels of anxiety, we hypothesized, would move the respondent toward the monopathic end of the monopath-poly-

12 Problems of Cognitive Styles path spectrum. Several measures of anxiety were reviewed including Taylor's "Personality Scale of Manifest Anxiety" (1953), Endler, Hunt, and Rosenstein's "S-R Inventory of Anxiousness" (1962), and Silver's anxiety inventory (1968). Silver's scale, which deals especially with anxiety and law school, was shortened considerably, and some of the questions were reworded. As he had established no statistical history for the scale, these modifications did not disrupt any possible comparisons with prior studies. 3. Use of Existing Tests We aimed to use existing tests that had been standardized and validated. We investigated more than thirty written tests that were germane to the monopath-polypath paradigm. "Intolerance of ambiguity" (Budner 1962), "Machiavellianism" (Christie and Geis 1970), "dogmatism" (Rokeach 1955), and "elaborated and restricted codes" (Bernstein 1966) were some of these tests. We preferred tests that asked about behavior rather than beliefs. 4. Development of New Tests We selected Budner's intolerance-of-ambiguity test, the Berkowitz and Wolkon version of the F-scale, and Silver's anxiety test. We also developed a number of new tests, including some open-ended instruments. The three new closed-ended tests were those of legalism, opportunism, and cognitive self-image. The legalism test sought to isolate the student's pragmatic versus doctrinal tendencies in dealing with statements about the law and the legal profession. The pragmatic is polypathic while the dogmatic is monopathic. In law the pragmatic is the realist tradition, while the dogmatic adheres to the black-letter conception of law. The opportunism test measures the informal, non-rule-directed, manipulative approach to the world. This is like a test of Machiavellianism, but, unlike the Christie and Geis test, which asks for agreement or disagreement with aphorisms

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about human nature, the opportunism test focuses on the respondent's actual or projected behavior. The cognitive self-image test was designed to measure the degree to which a respondent identified with or was alienated from most other law students, and from most lawyers. The formation of this test was derived from a section of Silver's anxiety scale. It used twenty adjectives that describe aspects of behavior instrumental to the practice of law. The differences in the ratings the respondents gave themselves and their ratings of lawyers or other law students were summed. Each sum represented the alienation from or identification with the other group. 5. Validity of New Tests An important problem with new tests designed specifically for appraising a particular hypothesis is to validate these tests. Fred Kerlinger (ed., 1973, p. 463) suggests that the first step is to deduce the relationships the new tests should have to other independent tests. One deduces the presence of a relationship, whether it is positive or negative, and how strong it is as measured by a correlation coefficient. We predicted that the legalism test would be moderately and positively related to two other tests, intolerance of ambiguity and authoritarianism, that had been reported extensively in the research literature. We also thought the opportunism test would be moderately and negatively related to the three other tests. We did not expect a high correlation between any of the tests, since we supposed they measured different aspects of an underlying trait. As Kerlinger points out, too high a correlation would discount the claim to validity of a new test of a new construct. It would show that the new test measured the same trait as the test it was being related to. Our findings showed, as predicted, a moderate positive relationship between the legalism test and the intolerance-ofambiguity and authoritarianism tests. But we found only a small negative relationship between the opportunism test and the others. Moreover, the opportunism test appeared as a dis-

14 Problems of Cognitive Styles tinct factor in our factor analysis computations. Thus the opportunism test appears independent of all the other tests used in this research. While we have some evidence for the validity of the new legalism test, the opportunism test resisted these attempts to validate it. Yet the test discriminated well among respondents and showed substantial internal reliability. 6. Pretest and Assembly of Final Questionnaire The final battery of tests was pretested at St. Mary's University Law School in San Antonio with some eighty-five firstyear torts students. No major difficulties were encountered and there were no indications of needs for major changes. The final research questionnaire, which is included in the appendix, consisted of 147 items. The first 87 were presented in a five-point Likert format. The first 20 items comprised the legalism test; the next 20, the anxiety test; the next 15, the intolerance-of-ambiguity test; the next 20, the opportunism test; and finally there was the 12-item Berkowitz and Wolkon F-scale. The remaining 60 items made up the cognitive selfimage test, which was also scored on a five-point scale. The questionnaire booklet was reusable, and the respondents recorded their answers on a standard optical scanning form. The questionnaire was designed to take about forty minutes to complete, but most respondents finished in less time. 7. Biographical Information on Respondents No provisions were made to collect biographical information about the law students on their answer forms. We had, or believed we had, other access to those data. The respondents were identified solely by social security number and by a code for retrieving their professor and law school. The social security numbers were themselves coded and shortened to take up less time and space during data analyses. For our purposes, it was enough to know that respondents were first-year law students at accredited U.S. law schools. Although it would be a

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large and interesting study in itself, we planned no analysis of the possible demographic correlates of cognitive styles. The Problem-Solving Test The questionnaire described above is a pencil-and-paper selfreport. It depends on the accuracy of the respondents' selfreports and presentation of themselves, and it was not the most direct way to observe cognitive style. Accordingly, this study also included a behavioral exercise. A subsample of forty law students from the University of Michigan, University of Missouri at Kansas City, Kent University and John Marshall Law School were asked to take a verbal problem-solving test and report aloud how they were going about solving these problems. Their responses were tape recorded. The students were encouraged not to rationalize their solution logically, but to describe all the dead-ends, halfremembered associations, mental shortcuts, and intuitive leaps they used in solving the problem. The problem booklet is included in the appendix. Although this method of investigation also depends on the accuracy of the respondent's self-report, this test provides a separate access to the student's cognitive style. Specific answers to questions were not so important as the way the student arrived at them. While "correct" responses were possible for most of the questions, we expected the ways to reach a correct response to be quite varied. We also wanted to discover how an incorrect response is obtained. No statistical analyses of the right and wrong answers was planned or undertaken. The object of this part of the research was to observe cognitive styles more directly than was possible through the questionnaire. The emphasis on the process rather than the product of cognition is not novel to this research, nor is the "thinking aloud" technique. Benjamin Bloom and Lois Broder (1950) studied problem-solving processes of college students at length using

16 Problems of Cognitive Styles the same technique, although they used a note-taking proctor rather than a tape recorder to gather the data. While their study was primarily methodological, they did report many different ways of solving different kinds of problems. They were not concerned, however, with discovering individuals' persistent approaches in problem-solving technique, or what we call patterns of cognitive style. Data Gathering 1. Sample Collection In the summer of 1974, we randomly selected some 200 persons from the list of 673 teachers of torts in the 1973 edition of the Directory of Law Teachers published by the Association of American Law Schools. Only the 156 law schools accredited at the time by the Association of American Law Schools were represented in the directory. Those teachers included in the directory were identified as torts teachers by responses to written questionnaires sent out by the editors of the directory, but there was no assurance that those listed would actually be teaching torts during the time of this study. The research design called for a sample of not more than 40 professors. A preliminary sample of 130, it was felt, would eventually yield at least 40 participants. In making this selection we used a table of random numbers. 2. Data-Gathering Trips to Participating Law Schools Beginning in January 1975, Pat Nester made a series of trips to law schools represented in the sample. Arrangements had been made with the participating professor for Nester to administer the questionnaires in person. In cases where the travel schedule could not fit the schedule of torts classes, the professors were asked to administer the questionnaire to their students. Completed questionnaires were mailed back to us. In addition to the standard questionnaire, some professors

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were asked for permission to administer the supplemental instrument dealing with verbal problem-solving skills. At these schools, a limited number of student volunteers came in one by one at scheduled times to respond orally on recording tape to the written questionnaire. These students were paid two dollars each for their efforts. 3. Law Schools in Sample Seventeen law schools in our sample participated after visits, and five others participated by mail. Those visited were: Capital University (Columbus, Ohio), Cleveland State University, University of Detroit, Duquesne University (Pittsburgh), Golden Gate University (San Francisco), University of Houston, Kent University (Chicago), Loyola University (Los Angeles), John Marshall Law School (Chicago), University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), University of Missouri (Kansas City), University of Nebraska (Lincoln), University of Northern Kentucky (Covington), University of San Diego, Southern Illinois University (Carbondale), University of Texas (Austin), and University of Toledo. The five law schools that participated by mail were: Brooklyn Law School, Hofstra University (Hempstead, New York), University of Mississippi (Oxford), University of Montana (Missoula), and Suffolk University (Boston). Ten other law schools declined to participate. The preparation of the data for the computer revealed some incompleteness in the forms for Cleveland State University and the University of Houston. These schools were reluctantly removed from our sample. 4. Professor Response to Questionnaire A request was made of the participating professors to take certain sections of the research questionnaire themselves. (Omitted were the sections on anxiety and self-image.) Only twentytwo professors mailed back answer sheets complete enough for statistical analysis. Descriptive statistics were prepared for the professors' responses.

18 Problems of Cognitive Styles 5. Final Torts Grades of Students Either during the in-person visit or by mail, arrangements were made at each law school to obtain the release of participating students' final grades in torts. Under the 1974 Buckley Amendment to the Education Act, this required obtaining a signed authorization form from each student permitting the law school to release the grade to us. The statute also required us to specify the uses to which this confidential information would be put. A copy of the authorization form is included in the appendix. All data of this kind used in this study have been authorized in this manner. 6. Complication of Varying Teaching Formats One complicating factor in data gathering was the different ways in which different law schools teach torts. Many teach it to first-year students for only one semester. Many that teach it over two semesters use different professors to teach each term. Since one of the research hypotheses dealt with the effect of the instructor on the students7 cognitive styles, it is necessary for this study to omit all those prospects who were not teaching torts to the same group of students for both semesters of the 1974-1975 academic year. This reduced the sample of participating professors unexpectedly, because we had only been familiar with and had only planned for the two-semester type of freshman torts course. 7. Summary of Data Gathering The total 22 34 30 969 782

data collected include: participating law schools torts classes participating professors total student responses complete and usable student responses to the main questionnaire, including final torts grade

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36 completed taped responses to supplemental questionnaire on verbal problem solving 22 usable professor responses Statistical Processing and Coding 1. Coding of Responses The original answer sheets were transcribed onto coding forms, which were then used to punch data cards. A check of the punching reveals less than one punch error per one thousand key strokes. Each item response was punched so that agreement with the item received the highest score. When the question asked the respondents to choose between two statements, a high score indicated agreement with the first statement. Some questions were phrased so that an agreement meant a low score on what that test measured. On the legalism test agreement with question 9, for example, meant low legalism. In these cases the scoring was reversed before some types of processing so that agreement was at the low end of the scale rather than the high end. 2. Analyses Data were analyzed with several statistical techniques, including item analysis, factor analysis, correlation analysis, analysis of variance and covariance, multiple regression analysis, and discriminant analysis. a. Item Analysis Item analysis measures the strength of a test, that is, it measures the degree to which all the questions fit together. It shows how well the responses to each question agree with the responses to the other questions in the test. The extent to which all the questions on any one test were all answered in a consistent manner measures the reliability of the test, that

20 Problems of Cognitive Styles is, the degree to which the test measures what it was designed to test. The item analysis calculates the means and standard deviations of the responses to each question. It also combines the questions from each test into a total test score and correlates the individual questions with this total test score. This measure of internal consistency or reliability of the test is expressed as an alpha coefficient. This statistic ranges from o to 1.0 and is read in a manner similar to a Pearson correlation coefficient. b. Factor Analysis While item analysis measures how the various questions of one test fit together, factor analysis measures how well the various tests fit together and it determines what other groupings of questions there may be on all the tests taken together. Factor analysis is a powerful statistical technique for summarizing a large amount of data. The analysis begins with a correlation matrix of all the individual questions that were used in the tests of legalism, opportunism, intolerance of ambiguity, authoritarianism, and anxiety. This matrix of eighty-seven by eighty-seven questions was studied to identify underlying groups of correlations. These groups are called factors or components. One use for this technique is to check whether the sets of questions that were originally put together as tests by the researchers were similarly perceived as related groups of questions by the respondents. For example, in this study some questions from the intolerance test form a stronger group with some questions from the authoritarianism test than with other items from the intolerance test. This finding was, however, unusual in this study. The factor analysis is performed in three steps. First the correlation matrix is prepared. Then the computer program extracts the first set of factors, that is, it groups test questions that are statistically related. The initial factors are then rotated to determine the final factors. Two types of rotation were used: orthogonal and oblique. These names come from the method of locating the factors. The center line through each

Methodology

21

factor is called an axis and describes the location of each of the questions. In orthogonal rotation all the axes are at right angles to each other. In the oblique rotation, the axes may be at any angle specified by the research. If no angle is specified, the computer program uses 45 degrees. If the factors are closely related an oblique solution may be more accurate because interrelated factors may lie closer together, closer to 45 degrees than 90 degrees. It is accepted statistical procedure to use several different factor programs and different numbers of factors. By looking at different numbers of factors the researcher can interpret those which persisted in the different runs. The factors that persist over several runs where different numbers of factors are called for should be the most robust and should best represent the underlying structure of the concepts being investigated. Some statisticians contend that researchers should perform both oblique and orthogonal rotations, while others have found little difference between orthogonal and oblique rotations. We made and compared both kinds of analyses, and because the correlations showed our tests to be somewhat related to one another, we analyzed the oblique factors. We factor analyzed for two, three, four, five, six, seven, and nine factors. We studied the changes that appeared as the number of factors increased to see how well the factor groupings held together. The changes indicated the relative strengths in the factors and the relationships among the factors. One of the most important relationships that emerged was the order of independence of the factors. As different numbers of factors were extracted the questions did not reorganize into substantially different factors. Rather, when the number of factors was reduced, the items from the weakest factors moved to the first or general factor. Thus on runs of four, three, and two factors, one test joined the first factor with each reduction in the number of factors. As we increased the number of factors to five, six, seven, and nine, the later factors became uninterpretable and were not used in the analysis.

22 Problems of Cognitive Styles c. Correlation Analysis Correlations express relations between two tests. High correlations between two tests indicate that the tests were actually testing for similar characteristics; low correlations indicate that the tests are independent and measure different characteristics of cognitive style. Correlations describe both the strength and the direction of the relationship between two tests. They also provide a means for comparing relationships between one pair of tests and another pair of tests. To illustrate, a Pearson correlation coefficient of .3 for two tests shows a stronger relation than one of.1. The computer program that calculated the correlation coefficients also calculated the statistical significance of the relationship. That is, it measured the likelihood that the correlation was not due to chance or error. d. Analysis of Variance The analysis of variance is generally used to determine whether the respondents belong to the different groups. It tests for differences among the means of several groups. We wished to find whether the means on a test would vary if the subjects were divided into high, medium, and low groups on another test. The grade received in the torts course provided one grouping for measuring differences on the other tests. Other groupings we used were level of anxiety, LSAT score, and law school. These were the most independent measures in our study. This is one-way analysis of variance, because only one variable, here the grade, or anxiety, or law school, or LSAT score, is used as a basis for assigning the respondent to groups. This method of analysis considers two types of variability. The first is the variability of subjects within each group, while the second is the variability between the different groups. If there are significant differences between groups, then each group will be relatively homogeneous. Suppose the responses on a test range from o to 100, and the respondents are divided into high, medium, and low amounts of studying. If the groups were different they might have means of 40, 60, and 80 respectively,

Methodology

23

and each group have a range of 20. No groups would overlap, and differences would be accounted for mainly by group membership. The most strongly supported differences among the groups we found were by the law schools attended. e. Analysis of Covariance The analysis of covariance was used to test for nonlinear relationships among the different tests. As the score on the legalism test increases one point at a time, does the score on the opportunism test increase by 2, 4, 8, 16 . . . points? Thus the score on the test which is chosen as the covariable is squared. The analysis of covariance detects nonlinear relations. In general, the analysis of covariance revealed no curvilinear relations in any of the computer runs. f. Multiple Regression Analysis Multiple regression analysis yields an equation in which one variable is "predicted" from a set of other variables. In this study, the scores on the legalism, anxiety, and other tests were the variables. The multiple regression analysis in this study yielded a set of equations in which different tests were "predicted" by the combined relationships of several other tests. For example, grade in the torts course, though not strongly related to any one of the tests, may be predicted by the cumulative score on four or five of the tests. We calculated the total amount of variability for each test. This amount or statistic is the multiple R squared. The multiple R squared is the sum of the squares of all the correlations of the equation variables with the variable being predicted. It represents the percentage of the total variance which is explained by all the relationships in the particular equations used. Such an equation can say, for example, that 50 percent of the variability of the scores on the legalism test can be predicted by the sum of the scores on the legalism and opportunism tests. We also calculated the statistical significance of this equation, that is, the likelihood it does not represent chance or error.

24 Problems of Cognitive Styles g. Discriminant Analysis Discriminant analysis is used to distinguish between two or more groups of respondents. In discriminant analysis, the students were divided according to their law schools. The discriminant analysis determined whether the students at different law schools scored differently on legalism, anxiety, and each of the other tests. When the test scores varied for different law schools, the tests could be said to make a discriminant analysis. Response Consistency The consistency test we developed for this study measures the extent to which law students tended to mark the same response rating regardless of the content of the questions. For example, did the respondents always mark "disagree" or "strongly agree" or "undecided"? Or did they scatter their responses among the five possible choices? The consistency statistic measures regularity of response or, conversely, the extent of scatter. This test was developed to determine whether responses on a test such as anxiety or legalism may be biased by the respondents' tendencies to mark everything neutral, or the preponderance of questions "agree," or many adjacent ratings. We noticed that students tended to mark very heavily either of the moderate ratings, and not to mark the two extreme ratings or the neutral middle rating. Student responses to any test item tended to be either moderate agreement or moderate disagreement. The undecided, extreme agreement and extreme disagreement ratings were equally deviant. On the whole test, however, the students tended to fall in a normal or bell-shaped distribution. By combining several questions into one test the distributions were smoothed out. If the student had consistently marked the moderate rating for all the questions on a particular test, the distribution should have been bimodal. In this case the students who consistently marked moderate agreement would have been in one

Methodology

25

distribution and those who marked moderate disagreement would have been in the other mode of the bimodal distribution. But there was no bimodal distribution. Therefore the normal distribution must have resulted from respondents moving from the moderate agreement to the moderate disagreement category. The strong central tendency of the normal distribution did not result from large numbers of respondents marking "undecided" categories; the responses for the individual questions showed that very few marked that center category. Consistency Test Construction Of the eighty-seven questions which were used to build the legalism, anxiety, intolerance-of-ambiguity, opportunism, and authoritarianism scales, fifty were used for the consistency test. Each response was a choice of one of five ratings from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree." The responses were recoded or reversed when necessary as in other analyses. Then the number of responses each student made in each response rating for all the questions was totaled. This set up five separate totals for each respondent. The number of responses in each of these variables or totals fell in a normal distribution. Then each individual's sum of responses in each rating was subtracted from the sum of that individual's responses for each other rating. For example, the total of "strongly agree" responses was subtracted from the number of moderate "agree" responses, from the number of "undecided" responses, from the number of moderate "disagree" responses, and from the number of "strongly disagree" responses. This process was repeated for each of the other response rating totals. For each of these subtractions the absolute value of the difference was calculated. Then all the absolute values from all the subtractions were summed. The total of these absolute values represented the score on the consistency test for each individual. If an individual was perfectly consistent and in all cases marked the same category, the calculations would be as follows: For the fifty questions in the consistency tests, the

26 Problems of Cognitive Styles individual would have the value of 50 in the single category in which all the responses were placed. Then that 50 would be subtracted from the total responses for each of the other categories. For each possible subtraction, either 50 would be subtracted from o or o would be subtracted from 50. In all cases the absolute value would be 50. For the five response categories on each question, there were twenty possible subtractions. Given twenty subtractions and the maximum possible absolute value on each subtraction of 50 because all fifty variables were used, the total possible value on the consistency variable would be 1,000. In the other extreme case, where the individual was perfectly inconsistent and for fifty responses made ten responses in each of the five response categories, each subtraction would be 10 subtracted from 10. For the twenty possible subtractions the value on the consistency test would be o. The score on the consistency test can go from 1,000 for complete consistency to o for complete randomness. This then is how the tests were developed, the data were gathered, and the statistics processed.

TESTS OF COGNITIVE STYLES

Chapter 3 Legalism

The Legalist Style Judith Shklar in her book Legalism (1964) regards a legalist as a rigid ideologue for whom rules are psychological and moral necessities, if not realities. Walter Probert in his Law, Language and Communication (1972) maintains that extreme legalism is a pathology. Following Korzybski's line of development, Probert suggests that legalism is a psycholinguistic hammerlock on perception and cognition. It traps personalities in narrow conceptions. It meshes with the emotions in such a way that the emotions badly disrupt communication patterns. It causes one to consider rules as "out there" fixities that can be applied unambiguously to circumstances. Hardly anybody outside an institution, says Probert, is likely to be a complete legalist. Differing orientations toward the rules will obviously be important to law students and lawyers. Doctrinal legalists may appear to be more self-confident and assured because they believe in the immutability and precision of the letter of the law. On the other hand, they may be easily outflanked by nonlegalist advocates who can lift the verbal veil of the rule under review. Measuring Legalism We developed a set of propositions to elicit responses that represent degrees of legalist cognitive style. The following reference points generated the propositions:

30 Tests of Cognitive Styles 1. The postulate of existence. Legalism holds that rules have an existence like Plato's Ideas. This postulate is represented in the legalism test by the proposition that: Legal concepts can be used to rather faithfully describe the world of empirical reality. 2. The assumption of autonomy. Rules have an independence of their own. The law is a separate realm of being, an autonomous and sovereign state of statutes, decisions, and words. Persuasion and advocacy are but tools for discovering the proper rule. The assumption of autonomy is scaled with responses to: "Preservation of the laws" is one of the primary goals of the legal system. It is more important to know how judges7 minds work than to know rules of law. (Reversal) Teaching skill in negotiation and persuasion should be top priority in law schools. (Reversal) 3. The sense of sovereignty. The rules of law out there are an institution to be served. It is the state, the church, the family. It is the master and each of us is the servant. Respondents indicate allegiance to the sense of sovereignty in the degree to which they support the propositions that: Freedom is possible only when it is secondary to law in the hierarchy of social goals. Acting for the public good without using the formal processes of law is too likely to result in arbitrary action. 4. The settling of disputes. The settling of disputes between people and even the weighing of alternatives by one's own conscience are accomplished by following those rules "out there"; the law says how something is to be resolved. To disregard one rule of law requires finding another rule of law or "legal principle" to justify this action. This belief is measured by responses to the following items:

Legalism

31

Anarchy would result if civil disobedience on grounds of conscience were encouraged by society. It is almost always better to follow the letter of the law than to act on the basis of expediency. The policy of "justice" is superior to a policy of "the greatest good for the greatest number." We should all work toward the time when arbitration will replace litigation. (Reversal) 5. The distinctiveness of divisions. The law has clear-cut distinctions. This is battery and that is murder,· this is a tort and that is a contract; this is judicial law and that is legislative policy. Legal categories are minimally ambiguous. The postulate stimulus to which the participants respond is: Politics deals with persuasion and policy-making; law deals with evidence and the determination of justice. 6. The moral law. Human conduct is measured by law and not by persons. Stimulus items are: "Doing the right thing" means obeying the rules that properly define one's rights and duties. That "the law says we must" is a pretty good reason for most daily conduct. Situational factors are always the greatest determinants of appropriate moral conduct. (Reversal) "A government of men, not of law" would be a perversion. 7. Veneration of the process of law. The legal process consists of duly constituted courts that find the rule that is applicable to the case at hand. The rule cannot and should not be manipulated to serve the special interest of the people involved. This is a sovereign and self-serving process. Only certain kinds of problems are appropriate for the legal process to handle. The following items were used to measure veneration of the process of law:

32 Tests of Cognitive Styles Using the court system to get something done is better than using other available social agencies. The principles of law necessarily apply in the same way to all men. The judiciary should hold itself aloof from daily public controversy. We should consider judges as lawmakers, making policy decisions like congressmen do. Solving social problems on a no-fault basis, without resort to courts, is a good idea. (Reversal) A low score on this legalism test indicates an openness to different conceptions and philosophies of law. It reflects a sensitivity to situational factors that, in a given case, may apply more than rules of conduct. As with the other tests used, we do not propose that even a perfect reading of the trait addressed by this test would be a foolproof predictor of conduct. In a particular situation, a legalist and a nonlegalist may choose to act in exactly the same way. Only over a wide range of observations should it become apparent that the extreme legalist has a restricted range of behaviors and of conceived alternatives compared to nonlegalists. The legalism test for this research was proposed by Allen E. Smith. The test we developed and refined consists of twenty items scored along a five-point scale running from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree." The midpoint of the scale was labeled "undecided." An earlier version of the test contained forty-six items, but it was reduced to the present size after two rounds of pretesting and analysis. The possible range of the legalism test ran from 20 to 100, the observed range from 33 to 83. The mean was 58.76 (compared to a midpoint of 60). Standard deviation was 7.94. The 782 respondents to the legalism test distributed themselves along a fairly normal curve. The distribution is neither flat and spread out nor narrow and peaked. It has little skewness and kurtosis. (See Figure 3.1.)

Legalism

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Figure 3.1. Scores on Legalism Test Reliability Using Cronbach's (1951) alpha coefficient, a reliability of .64 was computed for the test. The range of this coefficient is from o to 1.0. Having a high reliability normally means that respondents would give the same answers to the test if it were given to them repeated times. The alpha coefficient simulates this sort of reliability for a test that is given only once. It does this by measuring to what extent respondents answer the items on the test consistently. A respondent's answers to a well-designed legalism test should be all high or all low or all in between. The legalism test in its present form shows substantial reliability. Validity The validity of a test refers to two characteristics: (1) whether the test responses reveal sufficient order and patterning to in-

34 Tests of Cognitive Styles dicate the existence of a mental "construct" that the scale purports to address, and (2) whether the test measures the strength or intensity of the construct in the respondents. In empirical terms, validity is often measured by correlating a test with other established tests that measure the same or similar traits. The legalism test was designed to measure a part of a larger cognitive style: monopathism-polypathism. The respondent's notions about rules, legal doctrines, constitutions, statutes, and court-made laws should, therefore, be statistically related to some degree to other tests used in this research which also measure aspects of the monopathism-polypathism orientation. But the legalism test should not necessarily be strongly related to the other tests because it deals with a distinct subject matter upon which factors other than the monopathism-polypathism orientation may be operating. Comparing legalism to the authoritarianism, intolerance-ofambiguity, and opportunism tests, as presented in Table 3.1, shows all these correlations to be significant at the .01 level or better. The correlation with the opportunism test is negative, as expected. Can one say as well that the legalism test measures the intensity of the construct? One way to answer this is to observe the distribution of responses. It is very nearly normal, which means that the test distinguishes among the respondents with a substantial degree of predictability. There is no way to show conclusively from this single administration of the test that students sort themselves out along the normal distribution curve by reference to the legalism construct. If they do, however, the findings generated by this research are what would be expected. Conclusions and Implications The legalism test correlated with other tests used in this study at the levels shown in Table 3.1. The substantial correlation between legalism and authoritarianism indicates that those who venerate authority also venerate rules.

Legalism

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Table 3.1. Correlations between Legalism and Other Tests Intolerance of Ambiguity Opportunism Authoritarianism First-year torts grade LSAT score

. 17 -.19 .30 - . 100 -.03

An important hypothesis of this study was that polypaths would thrive in law school, being at home with constant ambiguity and multiple alternatives. Since legalism corresponds with monopathism, we would expect high-scoring legalists to do less well on their law school grades and, since it is a predictor of law school grades, the Law School Admission Test (LSAT). The legalism scale correlated significantly at -.100 with the first-year torts grade of the respondents. That is, legalists did less well in the torts courses. The LSAT score correlates at only .03, a correlation that is not statistically significant and is less predictive than the legalist score. When subjected to factor analysis with the other tests, the legalism test appears in the fourth factor, which is, by the nature of the factor analysis technique, weaker than the first three factors. In this factor, the items from the legalism test are mixed with a larger number of items from the authoritarianism and anxiety tests. This melange of items muddies the water and makes the fourth factor hard to interpret. The following items from the legalism test appeared on Factor 4. They are listed in the order of their appearance, which means in decreasing order of the strength of relation to that factor. Anarchy would result if civil disobedience on grounds of conscience were encouraged by society. Following this legalism item are two items from the authoritarianism test. The next legalism items were:

36 Tests of Cognitive Styles "Doing the right thing" means obeying the rules that properly define one's rights and duties. Freedom is possible only when it is secondary to law in the hierarchy of social goals. Following this was an authoritarianism item and then an anxiety item. The next legalism item was: Acting for the public good without using the formal processes of the law is too likely to result in arbitrary action. These items have some semantic uniformity, but they represent only a fraction of the legalism scale. The inference often drawn when factor analysis fails to select out large portions of a given test and to group its items in a single factor is that the test measures more than one trait. While that may be the case with the legalism test, legalism items appeared in strength only on Factor 4. Unfortunately Factor 4 is also laced with semantically disparate items from other tests. We hypothesized the existence of distinct cognitive orientations among law students: monopathism and polypathism. The legalism variable relates strongly to the monopathism orientation. Legalism is monopathism as it applies to rules and laws. Legalism includes veneration of institutional authority, in this case, veneration of rule-making and rule-interpreting authorities. Strong respect for institutions is common among monopaths. Thus, monopathic persons will believe their position on any subject is as firm and solid as the statute book. Legalism, likewise, includes the tendency to treat abstract rules as realities. The legalism test, judged on the basis of its reliability coefficient, appears fairly well integrated. The coefficient was higher than that of the authoritarianism test and the intoleranceof-ambiguity test, both of which have been extensively used by many researchers. The legalism test's failure to appear more distinctly in the factor analyses makes its strength somewhat questionable, but it distinguishes law students from one another along a fairly normal distribution.

Chapter 4 Intolerance of Ambiguity

The Ambiguity-Intolerance Style One of the most easily defined elements of cognitive style is known in psychology as "intolerance of ambiguity." Some people cope better than others with ambiguous situations. They are most at home with relationships and meanings which can be negotiated and are not imposed. Interest in the concept of intolerance of ambiguity derives chiefly from the work of Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, and Sanford (1950). Frenkel-Brunswik (1949) first reported ambiguity intolerance to be an emotional and perceptual variable which was related to an individual's difficulty in managing ambiguities and inconsistencies. She attempted to relate intolerance of ambiguity to authoritarian behavior (1949). Similar efforts were made by Rokeach, who later developed the related concept of dogmatism (1960). Guilford's factor-analytic research (Guilford et al. 1959) substantiated the concept of ambiguity intolerance. He delineated one factor containing two components, (1) "black-white thinking," i.e., "there are just two ways to attack a problem-right or wrong," and (2) a "need for definiteness." Some widely recognized differences between tolerance and intolerance of ambiguity are: Intolerance of Ambiguity

Tolerance of Ambiguity

1. Rigidity

1. Flexibility

2. Preference for thinking in extreme, limited categories, such as right or wrong

2. Preference for thinking in probabilities

38 Tests of Cognitive Styles Intolerance of Ambiguity

Tolerance of Ambiguity

3. Tendency to dichotomize the world

3. Tendency to avoid dichotomizing the world

4. Tendency to use prema--re closure on judgments at the expense of reality

4. Tendency to use appropriate closure on judgments so as to insure reality

5. Tendency to overuse premature reduction of ambiguous cognitive patterns

5. Tendency to be able to cope with or prevent premature reduction of ambiguous patterns

6. Tendency to be nonreceptive to new information

6. Tendency to be receptive to new information

According to Budner (1962), intolerance of ambiguity may be viewed as a tendency to evaluate particular phenomena in a particular way. He maintains that since intolerance of ambiguity refers to evaluations made rather than overt behaviors performed, a measure of attitude and values probably taps the construct more directly than a measure requiring inferences from observed behavior. Tolerance of ambiguity seems to bear directly on a person's ability to cope with and succeed in a high-variety environment. In law school, this variety is primarily intellectual rather than interpersonal. For many students, law school presents variety overload. Afterwards law practice adds a highly interpersonal sort of variety. This part of the present research took as its main hypothesis that persons who can tolerate and function in a high-variety climate will be better law students and, eventually, better lawyers. We expected the first-year torts grade and the intolerance-of-ambiguity test to be significantly correlated. We also expected that intolerance of ambiguity would be significantly related to other tests used in this research. Specifically, the ability to cope with high levels of variety is a central element in the legalism, authoritarianism, and opportunism tests. Legalist respondents were expected to show a

In toleran ce of Am biguity

39

distinct tendency toward using verbal rules to reduce variety when confronting social or intellectual problems. Authoritarian persons also search for verbal and personal authorities to reduce variety. Opportunism, we thought, would be inversely related to intolerance of ambiguity. The opportunistic turn of mind would be at home with ambiguity; it would continually seek and use ambiguity for its own ends. Measuring Ambiguity Intolerance The intolerance-of-ambiguity test used in this research was developed by Stanley Budner. Like the other tests used in this research, Budner's test asks the respondent to agree or disagree with a number of statements. Respondents who agree strongly mark a 5, and those who disagree strongly, a 1. A 3 response means "undecided." The test was scored so that a high score would indicate intolerance of ambiguity. As we interpret them, the fifteen statements comprising the Budner test deal with four kinds of preferences that come into play in both social and intellectual contexts. Items from the test itself are given after each kind of performance. 1. Preference for definiteness rather than vagueness. Teachers or supervisors who hand out vague assignments give one a chance to show initiative and originality. (Reversal) An expert who doesn't come up with a definite answer probably doesn't know too much. People who insist upon a yes or no answer just don't know how complicated things really are. (Reversal) A good job is one where what is to be done and how it is to be done are always clear. In the long run it is possible to get more done by tackling small, simple problems rather than large and complicated ones.

40 Tests of Cognitive Styles Many of our most important decisions are based upon insufficient information. (Reversal) 2. Preference for uniformity of opinion instead of diversity. The sooner we all acquire similar values and ideals the better. A good teacher is one who makes you wonder about your way of looking at things. (Reversal) 3. Preference for the static and orderly rather than the dynamic and unpredictable. People who fit their lives to a schedule probably miss most of the joy of living. (Reversal) It is more fun to tackle a complicated problem than to solve a simple one. (Reversal) A person who leads an even, regular life in which few surprises or unexpected happenings arise, really has a lot to be grateful for. 4. Preference for the familiar and routine instead of the novel or improvisational. What we are used to is always preferable to what is unfamiliar. Often the most interesting and stimulating people are those who don't mind being different and original. (Reversal) I like parties where I know most of the people more than ones where all or most of the people are complete strangers. I would like to live in a foreign country for a while. (Reversal) Each kind of preference reflects in some measure the preference of redundancy over variety in social or intellectual contexts. This meshes neatly with our monopathism-polypathism paradigm.

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Reliability The Budner scale of intolerance-tolerance of ambiguity employed in our study has shown fairly strong internal consistency (Budner 1962). Reliabilities reported for thirteen of his seventeen samples ranged from .39 to .62, with a mean of approximately .49. In our study, the intolerance scale had an alpha coefficient of reliability of .58. Validity The significant positive correlations observed between the intolerance-of-ambiguity test and the authoritarianism and legalism tests, as well as the intolerance test's strong showing on factor analyses, suggest a stable construct validity. In other words, the test measures some particular trait which strongly distinguishes itself from others when subjected to statistical techniques that group responses to tests according to similarities in answer patterns, as does factor analysis. In short, we have evidence that there is an "intolerance of ambiguity" in our respondents and that this test measures its strength. Conclusions and Implications Law students taking the test tended toward tolerance of ambiguity. The test's possible range ran from 15 to 75, but the recorded scores ranged only from 19 to 52. While the test's midpoint was 45, the test mean was 35.24. This skewed distribution had a standard deviation of 5.23, and was quite peaked. We computed the correlation coefficients between the intolerance-of-ambiguity test and the other tests in the research and also the torts grade and LSAT scores. The LSAT correlation was computed using a subsample of 162 participating students. As expected, the intolerance-of-ambiguity test was positively correlated with legalism and authoritarianism. Because of the conflict between conventional morality and the toughminded approach of the opportunist, it seemed reasonable to

42 Tests of Cognitive Styles

Figure 4.1. Scores on Intolerance-of-Ambiguity

Test

Table 4.1. Correlations between Intolerance of Ambiguity and Other Tests Legalism Authoritarianism Opportunism First-year torts grade LSAT score

.17 .41 -.08 -.05 .02

expect a negative association between the intolerance and opportunism tests. Nevertheless, the intolerance-of-ambiguity test was found to be virtually independent of the opportunism test, the torts grade, and the LSAT score.

Intolerance of Ambiguity

43

The failure of the intolerance-of-ambiguity test to correlate significantly with the torts grade may be related to the difficulty of predicting any one particular grade in law school. Even the best predictor available of law school performance, the LSAT test, had only a .195 correlation with the first-year torts grades in our study. Among the factors that make up a person's cognitive style, intolerance of ambiguity appears to be an important variable. Ambiguity intolerance deals quite directly with the substance of thought patterns. While some of the intolerance-of-ambiguity questions deal with interpersonal relations indirectly, the central issue is how the respondent copes with bewildering variety in solving social and intellectual problems. Since this is so crucial a part of law school and law practice, the concept of ambiguity intolerance deserves further development.

Chapter 5 Authoritarianism

The Authoritarian Style Authoritarian personalities are likely to be monopathic. They structure their experience on the basis of such authorities as rules, institutions, and persons. Authoritarians also display the constricted thought patterns that mark the monopath. Their continual deference to authority reduces their exposure to variety. They rely on certain mediators to feed them experience in simplified form. The authority may be God, the government, the boss, Webster's Second, or it may be duty, honor, good taste, mathematical elegance, or scientific parsimony. Any variety-reducing formulation that becomes a compulsive or habitual pattern for the individual is a monopathic symptom. Authoritarianism often links with other variety-reducing traits. Theodor Adorno, Milton Rokeach, and Else FrenkelBrunswik have explored many aspects of the authoritarian syndrome. They have shown that people who are high on authoritarianism measures tend to be more rigid and intolerant of ambiguity. Frenkel-Brunswik, in reporting the findings of her extensive research on prejudiced, authoritarian individuals, observed that "The prejudiced tend to show rigidity in their cognitive processes. There is sensitivity against qualified as contrasted with unqualified statements and against perceptual ambiguity; a disinclination to think in terms of probability and a favoring of black-white stereotypes . . ." (1949). Like the other monopathism-polypathism tests used in this research, the authoritarianism test is used partially to predict

Authoritarianism

45

performance. Our hypotheses were: (1) that student scores on this test would scatter sufficiently to permit the inference that a cognitive trait had been identified; (2) that scores on this test would correlate significantly with the other three monopathism-polypathism tests used in this research; and (3) that the scores on the authoritarianism test would correlate with our two measures of performance, the first-year torts grades and the LSAT scores. We proposed that the sophistic and conditional sorts of thinking encouraged and rewarded in law school would result in a correlation between the grade and the cognitive style, that is, that polypaths would make higher grades in law school. We proposed as well that the LSAT test rewards polypathic thinking, and we expected a correlation between the low end of this test and the LSAT scores, an inverse correlation.

Measuring Authoritarianism More than many others, the F (Fascism) scale has been widely accepted and widely used as a research variable. We used a modified version of it in this research. Scores derived from the F-scale have been used in studies of prejudice, leadership, rigidity, adjustment, and group behavior, among others. Rokeach defined the F-scale as a measure of a relatively closed cognitive organization of beliefs and disbeliefs about reality, built around a central set of beliefs about absolute authority which, in turn, provides a framework for patterns of intolerance toward others. The Berkowitz and Wolkon F-scale (1964) modified for this study was designed to force the respondent to choose between the positions set out; so no middle position was provided on the scoring form. We deleted this feature in our administrations of the test for two reasons: (1) it would have deviated from the five-point, agree-undecided-disagree scoring format used in all the other tests and would therefore have injected confusion and error into the scoring; (2) sophisticated respondents are apt to encounter statements of attitude between

46 Tests of Cognitive Styles which they cannot choose. Forcing volunteer respondents to choose between two positions they find untenable would likely result in a high rate of unanswered questions or unfinished questionnaires. The Berkowitz and Wolkon version of the F-scale used in this research asked the respondent to choose between two fairly elaborate statements reflecting attitudes. Sometimes these statements contradict each other; other times they introduce subtleties that demand rather close judgments between positions which are not logical contradictions. These elaborated statements, in our view, have less ambiguity than those used on other versions of the F-scale. The juxtaposition of two statements provides more of a context from which the respondent can draw more definite meaning. A respondent who is forced to evaluate the short, all-encompassing assertions found on some versions of the F-scale is too often apt to think, "Well that depends." This may be even more true of certain populations-law students, for instance. More fully elaborated statements may cut down on the tendency to disagree because of the categorical nature of the assertions. As we interpret it, this test measures attitudes toward four kinds of issues: (1) freedom of thought, expression, and action; (2) the proper education of children; (3) the relation of work to the social order,· and (4) the observance of taboos and prescriptions for living. The specific beliefs in the list below are a representative rather than a comprehensive itemization of monopathism-polypathism positions. 1. Freedom of thought, expression, and action. a. Polypathic positions: A wide variety of thought and expression, even of unconventional or irrational ideas, should be tolerated and encouraged. A high level of disarray and disorder is an acceptable cost of personal and social freedom.

Authoritarianism

47

The entire range of human thought and experience-including secret thoughts, passions, and fantasies-should be open to scrutiny. There is nothing to be ashamed about. All of us humans are pretty much alike. b. Monopathic positions: Certain thoughts and actions should be suppressed in one's own personal life and by society at large if harmony and decency are to be maintained. Some personal matters should be kept private. They are nobody else's business. 2. Education of children. a. Polypathic position: Children should be taught that personal freedom is the best goal for society. b. Monopathic position: A strong will, strict self-discipline, and respect for proper authority are the products of a good education. 3. Work and the social order. a. Polypathic position: The best gauge of a civilization is the proportion of jobs that are primarily concerned with thinking and personal expression and development. b. Monopathic positions: The social order depends primarily on the processes of commerce and the production of wealth. Work is a valuable tool for reducing the disorder in life. 4. Taboos and prescriptions for living. a. Monopathic positions:

48 Tests of Cognitive Styles Wisdom, maturity, and continuity are the proper goals of life. There are some arbiters of thought and action in life that always ought to be obeyed. b. Polypathic position: The polypath minimizes taboos and prescriptions. Reliability The reliability of our study's authoritarianism scale as measured by Cronbach's alpha coefficient was .58. This compares with reliabilities ranging from .41 to .71 reported by Berkowitz and Wolkon. Validity The various versions of the F-scale have often been cross-correlated to evaluate their relative validity. The Berkowitz and Wolkon version correlates with the original version of the Fscale at levels ranging from .69 to .83. We are more concerned, however, with attempting to isolate a somewhat different construct than those at which the F-scale ordinarily aims. So the moderate correlations between the authoritarianism test and the legalism and intolerance-ofambiguity tests suggest to us that the monopathism-polypathism construct may function as predicted. Conclusion and Implications Respondents to the authoritarianism test distributed themselves along a somewhat flattened normal curve skewed decidedly toward the less authoritarian end of the test. The test range was 12 to 60, and the observed scores ran from 18 to 53. But while the numerical midpoint of the test was 36, the average of the scores was over six points less, 29.55. The standard deviation was 5.21.

Authoritarianism

Figure 5.1. Scores on Authoritarianism Table 5.1. Correlations between and Other Tests Legalism Intolerance of Ambiguity Opportunism First-year torts grade LSAT score

49

Test

Authoritarianism

.30 41

-.04 -.06 .20

Table 5.1 shows the correlation coefficients computed between the authoritarianism test and the other tests, the torts grades, and the LSAT scores.

50 Tests of Cognitive Styles As expected, the authoritarianism test correlated positively with the legalism and intolerance-of-ambiguity tests and negatively with opportunism. A small but significant positive relationship appears between the LSAT scores and the authoritarianism test. Thus our hypothesis that the authoritarianism test was inversely related to law school performance was not supported. The importance of this finding will be discussed in more detail later. The authoritarianism test was linked rather solidly with two other of the monopathism-polypathism tests, intolerance of ambiguity and legalism. But the distributions on these tests, unlike that on the authoritarianism test, were not skewed substantially in either direction. We might expect that the link among these tests is among respondents scoring at the low end of the legalism and the intolerance-of-ambiguity tests. Otherwise a positive relation between authoritarianism and either of the other two tests would not be likely. This suggests a kind of polypathic solidarity on these three tests. While monopaths would scatter their answers from test to test, the polypaths would exhibit more consistency in choosing items on the low end of these three tests. This would result in a moderate positive correlation among them, as we found, and would explain such a relationship in light of the authoritarianism test's strongly skewed distribution. Further, the authoritarianism test distinguished among law students despite a rather skewed distribution of responses. We attribute the skewing in part to an ideological shift in the population of young people that has occurred since the Berkowitz and Wolkon F-scale was designed. The ideologies of a pervasive new subculture are "Do your own thing-especially if it feels good" and, to those in authority whose thing is not their thing, "Don't hassle me, and I won't hassle you." To renormalize the distribution curve of respondents might require an updating of the F-scale. As predicted, the authoritarianism test correlated moderately with two other monopathism-polypathism tests, legalism and intolerance of ambiguity. It also showed a very weak nega-

Authoritarianism

51

tive correlation with opportunism; the weakness of the relationship had not been anticipated. Contrary to expectation, the authoritarianism test showed a weak but statistically significant positive correlation with the LSAT score and virtually no correlation with the torts grade.

Chapter 6 Opportunism

The Opportunist Style Opportunism, as we define it, is an essentially amoral flexibility of mind. Opportunists at least think the unthinkable, whether they act upon those thoughts or not. The best-known proponent of opportunist doctrines is probably the sixteenth-century Florentine nobleman Niccolò Machiavelli. In The Prince (1940, pp. 56-57), his treatise on Renaissance statecraft, Machiavelli wrote: . . . many have imagined republics and principalities which have never been seen or known to exist in reality; for how we live is so far removed from how we ought to live, that he who abandons what is done for what ought to be done, will rather learn to bring about his own ruin than his preservation. A man who wishes to make a profession of goodness in everything must necessarily come to grief among so many who are not good. Therefore it is necessary for a prince who wishes to maintain himself, to learn how not to be good, and to use this knowledge and not use it, according to the necessity of the case . . . it will be found that some things which seem virtues would, if followed, lead to one's ruin, and some others which appear vices result in one's greater security and wellbeing. Opportunists prefer to work under conditions of maximum entropy, and revel in ambiguity. They prefer the informal, purely social channel to the formal, rule-oriented one. When forced to play by rules, they will bend or chisel them into

Opportunism

53

whatever form is necessary to accomplish a goal. They exploit every hint of hesitation or disorder in the opposition to win whatever game they may temporarily be playing. Opportunists are doers. They are not passive, although their style of activity may not appear dynamic to the short-term observer. Often they will abjure the overt exercise of power in preference for behind-the-scenes maneuvering. In the theoretical frame of this study, opportunists can be the most easily detected sorts of polypaths. They continually ignore rules of all sorts that obstruct accomplishing their ends. The rules may be rules of etiquette, rules based on tradition, or formal laws. When opportunists see that they cannot ignore a rule outright, they try to interpret the rule or redefine the issue so that the penalties the rule normally imposes do not apply to them. If the world were populated only by thoroughgoing opportunists, a Draconian state of "nature red in tooth and claw" would result. Polypaths and monopaths alike would founder in the confusion, although the polypaths might enjoy it more. Paradoxically then, the opportunist depends on the order established by more monopathic types. The opportunists rely on the presence of large aggregations of traditional order that can be theirs for the taking if they play the game cagily enough. They seldom spend the personal energies needed to create great empires of power or wealth. Rather they devise shortranged strategies that will give them an extra bit of leverage. Of course, the rewards opportunists seek are as varied as human life itself. They see all possible goals as moral equivalents and thus they have no guiding principle for their behavior. So they must borrow their goals elsewhere. We infer that opportunistic behavior reflects an unwillingness or inability to rely on elaborate cognitive and conceptual structures for processing information or for planning or executing behavior. Similarly, the opportunists' cognitive structures are ad hoc and their concepts merely functional. This mental state is the polar opposite of the monopath's world, where everything is, or should be, immutable, unambiguous, and ideal. While monopathic behavior is systematic and predict-

54 Tests of Cognitive Styles able, opportunist behavior is dynamic and unprincipled, approaching randomness. Persons with opportunist turns of mind are likely to make good courtroom advocates. They will not be appalled by the savagery of the criminal or the turpitude of the civil defendant. They play adversary games vigorously and often skillfully. Nor are they distracted by equivocation or by moralizing. We expected that they would make more nimble and successful law students and, eventually, lawyers. Measuring Opportunism Starting with a general concept that differentiated between an approach to problems and circumstances which is constrained by principles and traditions, and another approach which is free to look at multiple alternatives, we reviewed many aspects of this differentiation in the literature going back to Plato, and including Machiavelli, Erich Fromm, Lee Christie, Eric Berne, and many others. In developing a test of Machiavellianism, Christie and Geis (1968) selected seventy-one sentences from the writings of Machiavelli, expressing such ideas as "Most men are cowards" and "It is wise to flatter important people." Respondents were then asked to mark their agreement or disagreement with these sentences on a scale from 1 to 7. We did not use the Christie and Geis test, for three principal reasons. First, their test did not indicate what the Machiavellian mind-set was. The test lacked a theoretical foundation for selecting the items other than a tacit idea of the popular conception of Machiavellianism. It would be as plausible to cull seventy-one items from The Sound and the Fury and call them a Faulknerism scale. Second, Christie and Geis assumed that a disagreement with the test item was a positive response to the logical negative of that sentence. Thus, disagreement with "most men are cowards" becomes agreement with "most men are brave," although the first need not imply the second.

Opportunism

55

Third, the aphoristic generalizations presented in Christie and Geis's sentences did not fit in with the mind-set of law students in the 1970's. These students are likely to say "It depends" when asked to disagree or agree with such propositions as "Most people won't work hard unless you make them do it" and "You should always be honest no matter what." We therefore designed a test of our formulation of opportunistic behavior. We made up situations that presented people with behavior alternatives. The choices were to behave opportunistically as presented in our conception, or to act in a more dogmatic way. In pre-tests we studied and refined these alternatives. Then we formulated the eight pairs of characteristic approaches. Following each pair of approaches is an actual example from the twenty-item test of the alternatives. The test required respondents to choose between two statements and then to indicate the strength of their choices on a fivepoint scale ranging from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree" with a midpoint of "undecided." This format is similar to that of the Berkowitz and Wolkon F-scale which is also used in this study. 1. Situation oriented vs. rule oriented. It is your first day on a new office job. I. It's best to have visited the office beforehand and dress to fit what you perceive your role to be. II. It's best to determine the official rules and dress accordingly. 2. No moral constraints vs. moralistic. Your insurance agent asks you to put a value on a television set you owned which was destroyed by fire. I. You decide to show him your receipts for the original cost of the set. II. You consider various techniques that may net you the highest possible return.

5 6 Tests of Cognitive Styles 3. Informal and unofficial vs. formal and official. Several of you working in a group are unhappy with the work of one of the group members. I. You try to engineer situations in which your supervisor will notice the problem on his own. II. You lodge a formal complaint with the personnel office. 4. Personal vs. impersonal. While apartment hunting in a strange city, I. you call the phone numbers of friends of friends to see if anyone offers you a place to stay. II. you stay at a motel so as not to impose on anybody. 5. Manipulative vs. candid and open. You have hired a job applicant with a good record to work in a situation that requires absolute honesty and discretion. I. You assume that he will perform as required until there is reason to think otherwise. II. You think of ways to get detailed information about his performance for several months. 6. Argumentative vs. avoiding conflicts. You stop in to pick up some dry cleaning and you find you have forgotten the claim ticket, and a sign says "You MUST have ticket to reclaim items." I. You think of ways to get the clothes without the ticket. II. You decide to leave and come back the next day with the ticket. 7. Risk-taking vs. risk-avoiding. You are told that you must decide quickly whether to commit a substantial part of your savings to a high-risk, highgain investment opportunity. I. You try to figure out how to get more time for decision. II. You decide instantly so as not to jeopardize your prospects by procrastination.

Opportunism

57

8. Using ambiguity intentionally vs. avoiding intentional ambiguity. As general contractor you discover the specifications detailing the composition of rock aggregate to be used in a construction project are arguably ambiguous. I. You decide to use the materials that you imagine your customer had in mind even though your profits will be cut. II. You feel free to investigate cheaper, substitute components for the aggregate so long as the integrity of the structure would not be compromised. Reliability Test-retest reliability could not be computed for the opportunism test, since it was given only once to the respondents in this research. But the alpha coefficient, which is an index of how consistently respondents answer the items on the test in the same (either opportunistic or the opposite) direction was substantial, .62. This alpha was higher than that of two established tests used in this research, Budner's intolerance-ofambiguity test (.58) and the Berkowitz and Wolkon F-scale (.58). If one considers the alpha coefficient as a general measure of cohesiveness, the items on the opportunism test appear to be rather well integrated. Validity Since Opportunism is a completely new test, establishing its validity is a difficult procedure. This study has by no means completed the process. It is often possible to establish the validity of a new test by correlating it with older tests that are widely accepted by those knowledgeable in the field. We tried this cross-validation technique to a limited degree with the opportunism test. We thought that the other monopathism-polypathism tests would be related to only a limited extent with opportunism and that the relationship would be negative. The opportunism test dif-

58 Tests of Cognitive Styles fers because, of all the tests used in this study, opportunism alone focuses on projected behavior. The others deal primarily with processes we think are associated with monopathismpolypathism. As the findings below show, slight negative relationships did appear between opportunism and the other monopathism-polypathism tests, but these were not statistically significant, except for the relationship with legalism. They were not sufficient, nor were they designed to be sufficient, to establish the construct validity of the opportunism test. The opportunism test was semantically refined by a number of persons connected with this research and was modified by the deletions of weak items after a pre-test. More rigorous construct validation must await further research and development of the opportunism construct. Another line of analysis relates to the test's validity. When items from the intolerance-of-ambiguity, legalism, opportunism, authoritarianism, and anxiety tests were factor analyzed, numerous items from the opportunism test appeared quite distinctly as the third factor. This factor remained largely intact when computer runs of four, five, six, and seven factors were performed. One interpretation of this finding is that opportunism is a trait that can be isolated and measured by this test. Conclusions and Implications The standard descriptive statistics computed for the opportunism test are presented in Figure 6.1. They are quite similar to those for our other tests and seem to indicate that the opportunism test can be used with some measure of confidence. It distinguishes among respondents very well. As Table 6.1 shows, the Pearson correlation coefficients computed between the opportunism test and the other tests used in this research are low. Nevertheless the correlations are in the direction, plus or minus, that we predicted. Legalism, intolerance of ambiguity, and authoritarianism are cognitive styles and approaches to circumstances and prob-

Opportunism

59

Figure 6.1. Scores on Opportunism Test Table 6.1. Correlations between and Other Tests Legalism Intolerance of Ambiguity Authoritarianism First-year torts grade LSAT score

Opportunism

-.19 -.08 -.04 -.003 .07

lems. The styles they have in common do not explore multiple alternatives. But opportunism does explore such alternatives. It therefore fits with our basic conceptions that legalism, intolerance, and authoritarianism should be negatively correlated with opportunism.

6o Tests of Cognitive Styles Since the opportunism test was designed to reflect polypathism, we hypothesized that it would relate positively with success in law school. This expectation was not borne out by the correlation we computed between the torts grade and the opportunism test scores. The correlation was -.003, which was not statistically significant. Nor did the opportunism test relate significantly with the LSAT score, which is specifically designed to be a predictor of success in law school. This correlation was .07. Implicit in the design of the opportunism test is what might be called the paradox of the opportunistic lawyer. Because such lawyers look for inadequacies in and exceptions to the rules, they are situation oriented rather than rule oriented. They operate with fewer moral constraints, with greater informality, are more argumentative, and use more ambiguity than other lawyers. But the state and the social system are held together by rules, morality, formal arrangements, and all those things lawyers slalom around if they are opportunistic. The opportunistic lawyers are officers of the court, pledged to uphold the "rule of law" which is the glue of the state. Yet they keep trying to melt that glue. We have, therefore, evidence of the existence of opportunists who are potential lawyers in law school. We have not, however, been able to confirm a solid link between success in law school and the opportunistic tendency. Perhaps the range of variety in law school is too narrow and too bookish to give the opportunists a chance to distinguish themselves. Perhaps law practice itself, with its constant pressure of human interactions, is the better arena for that.

COROLLARY TESTS AND ANALYSES

Chapter 7 Anxiety

Anxiety and Cognitive Style One often hears that first-year law students are an anxious lot. Every graduate school is a challenge and an arena of competition, but law schools add at least two cognitively threatening and anxiety-arousing conditions. The Socratic method of teaching makes the students think for themselves. They cannot simply repeat what the teacher says, and this enforced independence is like being rejected by a parent. Second, there is the introduction to the adversary practice of law. This includes an introduction to looking at each situation as being potentially dangerous. Students are taught to think of all the terrible things that can happen in any situation. They are taught to be cautious. The adversary is not just the opposing attorney but all possibilities. Little wonder, then, that law schools are reputed to produce anxiety. Law schools also tend to be more anxiety arousing than other graduate schools for three practical reasons. One is simply the number of students in a course. There are many more students of high ability who compete for grades in law courses. A second reason is that in law courses the students generally receive little feedback on their performance until the final grades are given. Finally, law firms, the potential employers, place a great emphasis on first-year grades. We anticipated that different students would have different degrees of anxiety. Further, we believed that different degrees of anxiety might have different effects on the students' grades and scores on other tests in this study. We therefore tested

64 Corollary Tests and Analyses students for anxiety, and used their scores on this test as controls on their other test scores and grades. Measuring Anxiety We developed our test of anxiety after reviewing, among others, Taylor's ''Personality Scale of Manifest Anxiety" (1953), Endler, Hunt, and Rosenstein's "S-R Inventory of Anxiousness" (1962), and Silver's (1968) anxiety inventory, as presented in his "Anxiety and the First Semester of Law School." We took Silver's scale as a point of departure primarily because it dealt specifically with anxiety and law school. We restructured and shortened Silver's questionnaire considerably, and reworded some of the questions. The test for anxiety consisted of twenty statements. Students were asked to what extent they agreed or disagreed with each statement. The students evaluated each statement on a five-point scale indicating whether they strongly agreed, agreed, were undecided, disagreed, or strongly disagreed. All the statements were relevant to the law school experience, although one or two statements did not mention law school specifically: Even though I get a lot of sleep, I have been extremely fatigued lately. I am basically pretty industrious. Basically the test used two kinds of statements: those of stress and strain, and those of assuredness. Representative of the former are: I have been unable to really relax since I started law school. Many times I have felt completely lost in my school work. Statements of assuredness included:

Anxiety

65

I feel comfortable volunteering information in class. I have a fairly solid grasp of the material we're covering. Although Silver's scale provided a point of departure, the substance of these statements is very closely related to the Taylor and the Endler, Hunt, and Rosenstein tests for anxiety. Reliability Since Silver had not established statistical validity and reliability for his scale, our modifications did not disrupt possible comparisons with prior studies. We pretested our anxiety test and refined it. Then in the study itself we measured the internal consistency of this test. Its questions had as high an internal consistency as any similar test in the literature. The alpha coefficient of reliability was .75. Validity When we factor analyzed all the questions on our questionnaire in two, three, four, five, and six factors, the anxiety test items always appeared together on one factor. This finding suggests that the anxiety test has substantial validity. Moreover, the items on our test were answered in a highly consistent pattern across a substantial sample of students around the country. Conclusions and Implications Test scores on anxiety varied over a substantial range, but only about three-quarters of the possible range was used. (See Figure 7.1 for additional descriptive statistics.) Table 7.1 shows the correlation coefficients computed between the anxiety test and other tests used in this research. In general, anxiety had little relationship with the scores on the four main tests used in this research, although there is a small but statistically sig-

66 Corollary Tests and Analyses

Figure 7.1. Scores on Anxiety Test Table 7.1. Correlations between Anxiety and Other Tests Legalism Intolerance of Ambiguity Authoritarianism Opportunism First-year torts grade LSAT Score

-.05 .16 -.02 .02

-.077 .08

nificant relationship between anxiety and intolerance of ambiguity. If there is a monopathism-polypathism spectrum of cognitive style in the four tests correlated above, anxiety is independent of it.

Anxiety

67

Nevertheless, the small relationship observed between ambiguity intolerance and anxiety can be explained consistently with our approach to the study as a whole. Monopaths live in a world which should have only single possibilities. Thus they reject ambiguities because they are multiple possibilities. When they are faced with multiple possibilities they become anxious. A polypath, however, can accept ambiguity and not become anxious about it. We also divided the students into three groups of high, medium, and low anxiety test scores. The high and low anxiety groups included the upper and lower 25 percent of the sample. When we compared these three anxiety groups with their scores on the legalism, opportunism, and authoritarianism tests, we found no significant differences among these groups on these tests. But we did find that the high anxiety groups scored significantly higher on intolerance of ambiguity. This would account for the small correlation between anxiety and ambiguity intolerance. Ordinarily one is likely to believe that anxiety is bad. Security is healthy and worry is an illness. But in competitive situations, we are also likely to believe that anxiety can benefit us by stimulating our best efforts. Our findings support neither contention. We found a very weak correlation between anxiety and the first-year torts grades (-.077) which was not statistically significant. Neither did anxiety correlate significantly with the LSAT scores. The anxiety test performed its function well in this research. It served as a check on our tests of cognitive style. Anxiety, it appears, does not affect the elements of cognitive style that are the subject of this study. Rather it is independent of them. Because it appeared as distinctly independent in our statistical analyses, it validates to some degree the other tests. Unless they actually measured traits that could be clearly distinguished from anxiety, as predicted, they would not appear as statistically independent.

Chapter 8 Cognitive Self-image

Cognitive Self-image and Cognitive Style Numerous educational studies show a relationship between self-concept and achievement. We needed to control for the effects of self-concept in evaluating the effects of cognitive style on academic achievement. The cognitive self-image test was designed to provide this control. Whatever their basic way of thinking may be, people are likely to adapt to fit the social and intellectual situations they encounter. We change the way we think and act according to the expectations of our friends, our teachers, our employers. This adaptive mechanism functions primarily when we sympathize with, or strive to identify with, people who share our goals. We can also take great pains to distinguish ourselves from other possible reference groups. The reference groups we identify with and distinguish ourselves from provide an operational definition of our self-image. Sometimes we choose to endure uncomfortable circumstances among uncongenial reference groups. Perhaps we did not know what we were getting into before we invested too much energy, money, or emotion to withdraw. An example may be found in the feelings of despair and confusion many law students experience during the first year of law school. Law professors and fellow students place enormous stress on specialized thought patterns and ethical beliefs, and this emphasis can generate great anxiety. Most students adapt to some degree, and most pass their exams, but few make very high grades in law school unless they wholeheartedly decide to adapt to the new standards of thinking.

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69

Adapting to a new social and intellectual environment requires modification of a person's self-image. One assesses the new situation and decides which reference group to emulate and which to shun. The law school milieu is laced with strenuous competition for grades which intensifies the need to choose reference groups. First-year students seek out other first-year students they think will be successful. Mid-law and senior students are well aware of the sizable number of their classmates who, despite being academic "hotshots" in their prelaw years, have emotionally withdrawn from their legal training after having their egos seared by low first-year grades. The median grade (usually a mid-range C) imposed by many law schools on first-year courses can rain terror on the diligent and the laggard alike. And law schools admit fewer and fewer laggards. Published research on the relation of self-concept to performance makes as suspect that those who adapt more quickly and completely to law school become the more inspired, persistent, and successful in pursuit of a diploma and a legal career. This adaptation reduces distance, or the difference between the students' self-concept and their concept of other law students and of attorneys. Self-concept appears to affect both motivation and performance (see Purkey 1970) and to be related to cognitive style, which also affects performance. Therefore we tried to account for the effects of self-image on the measures of performance we used in this study, namely the first-year torts grade and the LSAT score. We designed the accessory cognitive selfimage test, items 88-147 of the research questionnaire in the Appendix. Measuring Self-image Our first assumption was that my concept of myself will relate to my concept of others I see as like myself in some way. We refer to these others in forming our self-concept. Therefore the cognitive self-image test asks the respondents to compare

70 Corollary Tests and Analyses themselves and two reference groups: "most law students" and "most lawyers." The test involves twenty traits, such as "courageous" and "imaginative," on which the respondents rate themselves, "most law students," and "most lawyers." The rating scale runs from "very strong" to "insignificant." The adjectives technique was derived from Joseph C. Bledsoe (1964), while the technique of rating the reference group and the respondent on the same adjective derived from the test devised by Lawrence Silver (1968). Most tests of self-image take a quite different approach. Most tests ask questions which in some way elicit a good or bad self-concept. Thus the test designers must describe positive self-image in terms of the traits with which they work. Often this subjective judgment will be culturally and situationally biased. Cheerfulness, for instance, might not be considered to be an especially positive, or even sane, characteristic in an urban ghetto. Anxiety might be the norm in the community of futures-market speculators. This evaluative judgment injects bias into the test at the outset. We took the position that the self-concept that brings success or contentment varies according to culture, stage of life, job, associates, and a host of other variables. No single set of parameters can define it for persons in different circumstances. The factor that best defines a constructive self-image is the person's degree of identification with specific reference groups relevant to his or her present life situation. Images of these reference groups continually inform and transform self-images. Naturally, a person does not always see a reference group as a positive model. We often convince ourselves that we can do better than the run-of-the-mill characters in our peer groups. Yet we judge ourselves at least partly by comparisons with others, and our self-image reflects at least partly our image of others. Law students may strive to identify with what they conceive to be the role of law students in general or with the role of attorneys. We can test for law students who do not identify with or sympathize with the roles of their fellow law students or with the roles of lawyers. These students would score high

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71

on tests of alienation, revolutionary sentiments, inadequacy, hopelessness, nihilism, or perhaps anxiety. Assuming that the students report their feelings accurately, those who display sentiments of alienation are less likely to be successful students, or lawyers. We tested students for the discrepancy between themselves and the reference groups. The greater the discrepancy the less well they would be expected to do in law school (here measured by the first-year torts grade). This may also apply to success in legal careers. We also hypothesized that law students identify more strongly with their peers than with lawyers, and that there is a positive relation between discrepant scores on the verbal selfimage test and the anxiety test. A high level of discrepancy corresponds with a high level of anxiety. Specific knowledge of the reference group is not the focus of attention in our self-image test. What is important is the distance between the respondents' image of most lawyers and their image of themselves. Our test measures relative values, discrepancies between scores, rather than absolute ones. For each law student taking the cognitive self-image test, we computed the sums of the differences between the "you" score and the "most law students" score for all twenty adjectives on the test. We did the same for the sums of the differences between "you" and "most lawyers." Then we took each of these two sets of sums and correlated them, respondent by respondent, with the scores on each of the four monopathismpolypathism tests: legalism, intolerance of ambiguity, opportunism, and authoritarianism. Reliability Although the cognitive self-image test is scored slightly differently from the other tests, an alpha coefficient can still be used as a measure of internal reliability. A perfectly reliable self-image test would contain items that all showed the same degree of difference between respondent and reference group. For instance, certain law students might score "most lawyers"

72 Corollary Tests and Analyses as 5 regarding how manipulative they are, and themselves as 3. The same students may see "most lawyers" as having only a 2 on "sense of humor" and give themselves a 4. In both cases they have seen a difference of two between themselves and the reference group. A perfectly reliable test for these students would be composed entirely of items that each reproduce this difference of two. If a test used in this research were a perfectly reliable measure of a trait, then each respondent's answer would be consistent with the same respondent's other answers on the test. The cognitive self-image tests showed high levels of internal reliability. The alpha coefficient for the "you" minus "most lawyers" test was .85; for "you" minus "most law students" it was .82. These alpha reliabilities were higher than those of other tests in this research. The high reliabilities on this test indicate that it approaches the theoretical goal of measuring self-image differences. Validity No other tests in the research were aimed at the same construct; thus there was no opportunity for cross-validation. But the construct and the format of this test are in the tradition of other instruments reported in the literature on self-concept, departing only in the method of scoring and analysis. Conclusions and Implications Table 8.1 and Figures 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, and 8.4 show how law students rated themselves as compared to "most lawyers" and "most law students" on the twenty adjective-traits comprising the cognitive self-image test. The figures use the following definitions of same, more, and less: 1. Same as means a difference less than or equal to .05 in the mean scores for each adjective trait. 2. More or less means a difference greater than .05 but less than .20 in the mean scores. 3. Much more or much less means a difference of at least .20 in the mean scores.

Cognitive Self-image

73

Table 8.1. Means of Discrepant Scores on Cognitive Self-Image Tests "Most Lawyers" minus "You" Cautious Conventional Cynical Firm Flexible Happy Idealistic Imaginative Intuitive Legalistic Manipulative Materialistic Practical Realistic Rebellious Self-confident Sensitive Tense Theoretical Good sense of humor

.66 1.13 .87

"Most Law Students" minus "You"

"Most Lawyers" minus "Most Law Students" 64 74 68 69

1.04 .59 .57

63 88 77 53 66 77 79 64 49 57 66 85 69 66

1.12

80

90

.84

67 85

77 59 83 79 53

•71

77 .76 1.19 .80 .60

.88 1.01

1.10

.78

70

.82

68

•71

61

62 60

1 13 54 46 70

79 54 65 74

Note: On any one adjective a student rates himself from 1 (very strong) to 2 (strong) and on to 5 (insignificant). On that adjective he also rates "Most Lawyers" from 1 to 5, and he rates "Most Law Students." Say that CAUTIOUS leads him to give himself a 3 and to give "Most Lawyers" a 1. The difference between himself and "Most Lawyers" is then 2, which is the discrepant score. The average of the differences for all students between their self-ratings and their ratings of "Most Lawyers" is the mean discrepant score.

As Figure 8.1 shows, law students see themselves as much more rebellious, sensitive, and idealistic than lawyers. They also feel they have much more of a sense of humor than practicing attorneys. Students also feel they are more flexible, happy, and imaginative than lawyers.

74 Corollary Tests and Analyses

Figure 8.1. Cognitive Self-Image Test: Law Students Compared to Lawyers

Cognitive Self-image

75

The students see themselves as about as tense, theoretical, intuitive, and cynical as lawyers. The students may have become so in their short time in law school, or these traits may be general personal qualities. Students see themselves as less practical, cautious, conventional, and realistic than lawyers. These views are characteristic for students who recognize they do not yet have to deal with actual problems of lawyering. They also say they are less firm and self-confident. This may reflect their position of facing years of more preparation to become lawyers. Students regard themselves as much less manipulative, materialistic, and legalistic than lawyers, which fits with their belief that they are much more rebellious, sensitive, and idealistic. Figure 8.2 shows that the students use fewer extreme categories in comparing themselves to their peers. Their greater familiarity with other law students and their similar situation may let them view themselves as more like their peers. They do consider themselves as much more sensitive and much less materialistic, and they rate themselves as less conventional, legalistic, manipulative, tense, and theoretical. Generally this goes along with their feeling of having retained more of their freedom and spontaneity than their peers. Their concept of themselves as more flexible, happy, intuitive, realistic, rebellious, and with more sense of humor supports their view. They consider themselves about the same as their peers in being firm, imaginative, practical, cautious, idealistic, selfconfident, and cynical. Figure 8.3 shows the perception students have of other students as compared to lawyers. The respondents viewed other students as being much more idealistic and rebellious than lawyers. They also felt other students were much more tense and theoretical than lawyers. They also rated peers as more cynical and sensitive than lawyers. Other students were viewed as being the same as lawyers on flexibility, sense of humor, and imagination. Students felt peers were less cautious, conventional, happy,

76 Corollary Tests and Analyses

Figure 8.2. Cognitive Self-Image Test: Law Students Compared to Peers

Cognitive Self-Image

Figure 8.3. Cognitive Self-Image Test: Peers Compared to Lawyers

77

78 Corollary Tests and Analyses intuitive, and legalistic than lawyers. They rated peers as much less materialistic, firm, manipulative, practical, realistic, and self-confident than lawyers. This view of other students as compared to lawyers reflects their status of preparing for future careers. In this way it is similar to the views students have of themselves. Figure 8.4 compares the results from the three previous figures. The ratings for the comparison of peers to lawyers, peers to self, and self to lawyers all appear. This figure shows the greater similarity in images of self and other students. Students see a greater resemblance between themselves and other students than they see between themselves and lawyers or other students and lawyers, although they feel quite a lot different from other peers. Students feel they are less socialized into the traditional values of lawyers than other students. Yet the law students see the two reference groups, peers and lawyers, as substantially different from each other. This finding could have important implications for self-concept research. As the reference group changes, the test scores are also apt to change. Tests that take the form of statements about the respondents with which they agree or disagree have an undefined and usually unacknowledged reference group with which the respondents must compare themselves. Statements like "I wish I didn't give up as easily as I do" raise the tacit question: "compared to whom?" We factor analyzed the self ratings for the adjectives to see how these adjectives clustered into factors that were important and basic to the students. We ran a three-factor analysis and wondered what kind of factors would appear. To our happy surprise we found they were in the main polypathism, monopathism, and anxiety. Factor 1 brought together with high loadings: imagination, intuition, practicality, and realism. These are like the characteristics of an opportunistic polypath. They involve coping with entropy, with how the students think they meet the situations they face. This factor also included self-confidence and firmness with high factor loadings. Then we went beyond fac-

Cognitive Self-Image

Figure 8.4. Cognitive Self-Image Test: Comparison of Law Students to Lawyers, Law Students to Peers, and Peers to Lawyers

79

8o Corollary Tests and Analyses tor analysis, beyond identifying what factors the students thought important, and we analyzed how the students rated themselves on each adjective in each factor. We looked at how imaginative, practical, or firm they thought they were. On the clearly polypathic adjectives in this factor-imagination, intuition, practicality, and realism-they rated themselves as strong and very strong. On the nonpolypathic adjectives in this factor, such as firmness and the high loading self-confidence, they said these traits were present in themselves but not conspicuous. Factor 2 brought together with high loadings: conventional, materialistic, and rebellious, the last scored negatively. These are like the characteristics of a monopath. The factor emphasizes tradition and fitting in. Factor 3 is like the corollary test of anxiety, and a control of the other tests and factors. It involves how tense the students feel they are, and also how cynical. They rated themselves slightly tense and slightly noncynical. Our analyses did not find that self-image is related to the first-year torts grade of the respondent. Correlations computed were very low. The correlation between the grades and the "you" minus "most law students" discrepant images was .02. Between grades and "you" minus "most lawyers" discrepancies, it was .02. These correlations are not statistically significant. In addition, the verbal self-image test was correlated with a sample of 165 LSAT scores. Again, there was no evidence that self-image and performance are related. The LSAT correlation for "you" minus "most law students" was .07; for "you" minus "most lawyers" it was .02. Neither of these correlations was statistically significant. The correlation coefficients show, therefore, that the cognitive self-image test performed its function as a control device for this research very well. They indicated that self-image is not related to the measures of performance used in this research: the LSAT score and the first-year torts grade. We may therefore look elsewhere for variables that affect these measures.

Cognitive Self-image

81

Table 8.2. Correlations between Cognitive Self-Image Tests and Other Tests "Self" minus "Most Law Students" .23* Legalism Intolerance of Ambiguity .17 * Authoritarianism .11* Opportunism -.08 Anxiety .23*

"Self" minus "Most Lawyers"

.29* .21* .27 * .04 .29*

* Statistically significant: p ≤ .05. From our data we cannot say whether the law students' selfimages affect their performance in a more general sense. There are several possibilities. Other measures of performance such as the entire first-year grade-point average may be positively related to self-image. The format or conception of this test, or of other self-concept tests that do show a positive relationship to performance, may be defective. The context, in which the test was one of a large battery of tests, may have biased the results. Law students could be a deviant group. Or perhaps self-image and performance have no relationship. Table 8.2 presents results of correlations between the selfimage tests and the monopathism-polypathism tests. On three of the four monopathism-polypathism tests, there was a statistically significant positive correlation between the discrepant score and the monopath pole of the test. Only the opportunism test showed virtually no relationship with the cognitive self-image test. Monopathic persons were somewhat more apt to see a greater distance between themselves and (1) other law students and (2) most lawyers. Polypathic persons generally saw less difference. The relative rates of adaptation of monopaths and polypaths

82 Corollary Tests and Analyses to the law school environment may explain this connection between monopathism and high discrepancies between images of selves and others. These tests were given to students during their second semester of law school. The students had been exposed to several months of rather intensive social and intellectual acculturation. In our model of polypaths and monopaths, we specify that polypaths are more tolerant of ambiguity, uncertainty, change, and any sort of variety. This tolerance of high variety probably includes tendencies to adjust quickly to new patterns, to be absorbed by new groups of people, and to learn the new jargon. Monopaths probably try less to blend in. As discerners of many fewer alternatives than the polypaths, they may see their own approach as valid or "true," and may feel that if adaptations are necessary, they need not rush to make them. When they are as socially compatible as the polypaths, they still resist changing their patterns of thought. The polypaths are probably less anxious about disparities between themselves and other relevant reference groups. As measured by the anxiety scale, first-year law students appeared not to be anxious about the differences they saw between themselves and most lawyers. They appeared to a slight degree to be even less anxious the greater the difference they saw between themselves and most lawyers, but when it came to their own peers, they were somewhat more anxious the greater the difference between themselves and their peers. The theory of the "chameleon polypath" can explain the small but significant relation we found between self-image discrepant scores and monopathism-polypathism. Obviously this theory needs refining, but it bears further research. As any law student knows, rates of adaptation to the law school culture vary from person to person. A better understanding of this phenomenon might help to resolve broader problems in such related circumstances as intercultural communication and minority group assimilation into a dominant culture.

Chapter 9 Problem Solving

Problem Solving and Cognitive Style We also observed cognitive styles more directly than was possible by pencil-and-paper tests. We developed a problem-solving test to bring in a second and autonomous verdict on the distinct cognitive styles and monopath-polypath patterns of responses. (See Appendix, Research Questionnaire on Oral Solution of Verbal Problems.) This test was time and energy consuming. As indicated in Chapter 2, we paid these students two dollars each for their effort on this test. A 5 percent subsample completed this test, that is, 36 of the 782 students for whom we obtained a complete file. We found that the students used half a dozen different strategies in solving these problems, which made the sample for each strategy too small for statistical analyses and comparisons. The strategies we found seemed closely related to the resolution of ambiguity, the use of one path or many to solutions, and other information-processing styles for which our other tests were designed. In the problem-solving test we emphasized process rather than the product of cognition, and used a "thinking aloud" technique. Benjamin Bloom and Lois Broder (1950) studied problem-solving processes of college students at length using the same technique. While their study was primarily methodological, they did report many different kinds of problems. They were not concerned, however, with discovering individuals' persistent approaches in problem-solving technique or what we call patterns of cognitive style.

84 Corollary Tests and Analyses Most previous research has first classified problem-solving strategies and then considered the problem-solving situation. We first observed the behavior and then classified the strategies. Consequently, the terms we developed for these strategies best describe what we observed and are not necessarily the terms used in the cognitive-strategy literature. Tests of Problem-Solving Style The first set of problems involved three analogies. This format called for the perception of relationships and the identification of a missing element. For example, the first problem asked for the missing word in an analog problem. As stated the problem read: "jog is to hop as (blank) is to leap." The respondents chose from four words: jump, bound, run, totter. One possible choice was run because leap is more active than hop and run is more active than jog. Although the process strategy was prescribed, that is, look for analogies, there were a number of observable differences in the way that relationships could be perceived. From the recordings we made of the students as they were solving these problems, we found they used four principal strategies: 1. Meaning: defining or describing each word and relating these words to one another in terms of these definitions and descriptions, in order to find the one word that best fits into the blank. 2. Elimination: successive trials of putting one word after the other into the blank, and after rejecting the poorer ones taking the best. 3. Random: unsystematic trials of different approaches. 4. Intuition: solution on the basis of "what feels right." In addition, we found three more approaches that may or may not be considered as process strategies. These students failed to verbalize the reasoning process, though not the solution:

Problem Solving

85

5. Justification: presenting the solution and then explaining why it is correct. 6. No Verbalization: giving only the solution. 7. Quits: failing to complete the problem-solving process. We found combinations of two or more of the above strategies. Some students switched strategies after solving one of the problems and found a more efficient process. Some students tried a random strategy with the first problem and then applied the most satisfactory of the tried methods as strategy for the next two problems. The second set of problems involved eliminations, selecting the item that does not belong with the others in a group. The nature of this set of problems also prescribed the way they had to be solved. The recordings indicated that the students felt these problems were more restrictive than the others. The instructions required the students to select one item that was different in each group of five items. The first group was stroke volume, Henle's loop, Heisenberg, adiabatic lapse rate, and glomerulus. The second group contained the forms zri, srub, vdolb, glib, and blfsplk. The third set was Iran, blue, stone, carrot, and chief. The students had to discover a relationship among four of the given items which could be said not to hold for the fifth item. For instance, in the first set Heisenberg is a scientist while the other choices are scientific terms; in the second set glib is the only English word; and in the third set Iran is the only proper noun. In each instance, however, other choices are possible. This was a test of the process and not of the product. The problems may be solved only if a relationship is perceived among the given items. Therefore, the observed differences in process strategies are due to differences in the perception of relationships. The relating strategies observed were: 1. Meaning: relating each word to other information about the other words in the series. 2. Structure: item and word endings. 3. Grammar: a strategy to differentiate the items according to the parts of speech: adjectives, verbs, nouns, etc.

86 Corollary Tests and Analyses 4. Random: used in the first problem of the set, trying out several ways of perceiving relations among the words. 5. Guess: may or may not be a strategy. It is most often observed in those students who attempt to define some overall meaning for a set of words, but who do not feel confident in doing so. They say, "I guess," or give an explanation of the failings of their grouping criterion. 6. Quits: no solution is reached; some reasoning may or may not be applied. Most students found that no one strategy could solve all three problems, and used combinations of two or three of them. Some of the consistency in the strategies is attributable to the constructions of the problems. The first and second sets appear to have built in the most obvious strategies for reaching solutions, the meaning strategy for the first set and structure strategy for the second. The grammar strategy was used with all three sets. The third set of problems involves the application of a rule to a given situation. The three problems in this section were devised by Walter Probert and used with his permission. The students had to devise interpretations of a rule needed to reach each of the two conclusions provided. One of the three problems in this section presented the student with the following rule and situation: RULE: One who has no respect for the law is a Hearo. SITUATION: Turnco is a lawyer who spoke publicly against the law of divorce as being a travesty on an otherwise almost perfect legal system. The student was instructed to present two lines of reasoning so that in one case Turnco is not a Hearo and in the other case he is. Again, the general process of solving this set of problems was prescribed in the instructions. We called this strategy interpretation. Out of thirty-six law students, only eight followed the instructions and tried to apply the interpretation strategy. Those students who failed to follow the instructions attempt-

Problem Solving

87

ed a number of other ways to reach one "best" conclusion. We identified the following strategies: 1. Interpretation: interpreting, translating, or paraphrasing the rule so that each conclusion can be reached, and determining how the rule and situation fit together. 2. Rule: rephrasing and particularly elaborating or reducing the rule for better understanding and application to reach a conclusion. 3. Situation: defining key words to fit situation components to reach a conclusion. 4. Random: no defined strategy observable. Student may bring in extraneous associations and facts (U.S. law); may be unable to differentiate lone from lonely, hearo from hero, dum from dumb; may arbitrarily pick a conclusion; may show discontinuity of thought by rambling, or reaching the same conclusion over and over, or losing train of thought; or may bring in personal feelings that have no bearing on the strategy. 5. Quits: may or may not attempt some reasoning process, never reaches a conclusion. Conclusions and Implications We found the following cognitive styles presented by these problem solutions: random, quitting, elimination of alternatives, and the relating strategies of meaning and structure. Random forms of all these approaches appeared on all three problem sets. We also observed some combinations of strategies, such as applying a strategy to two of the problems but quitting on the third. In terms of the monopath-polypath model, quitting fits the monopaths. They are more likely to quit when they see they will not find the single right answer. Elimination of alternatives is also monopathic when it involves looking for the single right alternative. Looking for meaning and structure has a strong monopathic element in that this strategy leads to one answer of some sort. While this answer may not be the answer, it at least completes the task. It provides closure.

88 Corollary Tests and Analyses The random strategy fits the polypath, who is more likely to search about widely or randomly for different solutions rather than stick with a favorite or one that was successful on a previous problem. Polypaths are less likely to use the strategy of eliminating alternatives. They keep them all open. It is difficult to identify which strategies were successful and which were not, because the problems had no correct answers. Success can be more a function of the observer than of the strategy or the student. That is, a strategy may be judged on the basis of how easily the observer was able to follow the reasoning process. Therefore all strategies were considered successful except where the reasoning becomes so obscure it had to be labeled random. This random process overlaps all other strategies for both problem sets. Randomness is, of course, hard to pin down. A student's behavior may have no order, or an observer may not recognize its order. Randomness calls for a polypathic tolerance of ambiguity. Once the reasoning process began to become obscure, either as a result of obscure premises, or because of discontinuity in the line of thought, the starting strategy became a random strategy. A strategy may be applied both successfully and unsuccessfully. In the final problem set, seven of the eight people applied interpretation strategy successfully, as judged by the clarity of the reasoning process. One student applied the interpretation strategy but spent a great deal of time coming to the same conclusions again and again. In a sense this student applied a random strategy. Both polypaths and monopaths seek solutions and may use the same approaches in particular problems, but from different motivations. Monopaths seek a solution because they are interested in having the answer, in the resolution of ambiguity, in closure. The pragmatic or polypathic approach is to seek an advantageous solution. There is probably a limit to the amount of information about problem-solving that can be gained by the self-reporting of the respondents. The need to self-report may completely change the nature of the problem for the respondents. They must con-

Problem Solving

89

sciously marshal their thoughts, organizing and recalling their logical processes. Problem-solving behavior may be a key to cognitive style. Future research should rely on observed behaviors of larger numbers of respondents supplemented by extensive statistical inferences. The self-reporting of cognitive processes may still be useful as a diagnostic tool.

Chapter 10 Differences among Law Schools

Different law schools may emphasize different cognitive styles. "Black-letter" law schools emphasize the letter of the law while other law schools emphasize coping with legal ambiguities. Such differences could affect the findings of this research. Even if the school itself does not induce a particular approach to information processing, its student body may be more homogeneous in cognitive style than law students throughout the country. Attendance at any law school means the student has been rigorously screened before being admitted. Students with similar orientations may for some reason attend one school and not another. Such screening and selfselection could bias the findings of this study. We did indeed find striking differences of this kind. Using one-way analysis of variance, we found that torts grades, authoritarianism, opportunism, legalism, and verbal self-image all varied with law school. Grades were uniformly higher at some schools than others. Up and down the line the differences were striking, and puzzling. The findings were highly significant statistically. Equally surprising, we found that anxiety and intolerance of ambiguity did not vary significantly from one law school to another. We sorted the scores on each of our tests by law school and looked for group differences. We ranked the twenty law schools in the sample by their means for each test. These rankings reveal patterns that suggest causal hypotheses, but we had great difficulty in formulating them, and in the end were unsuccessful.

Differences among Law Schools

91

In drawing conclusions from these means, one has more confidence as the sample size gets larger, and as the sample accurately reflects the universe of first-year torts students. Questions of sample size and sample randomness tempered our efforts to draw conclusions. As a check, we computed the analyses of variance a second time, including only the fourteen schools with the largest number of respondents (n > 20) in our sample. We obtained substantially the same results. There are clear differences in cognitive styles among law schools, but we don't know why Figure 10.1 shows law school rankings on the biggest and most significant variation among law schools computed in this study: the torts grade. These grades were scaled with A = 5 and F = 1. A mean of 3.5 then equals a mid-range C. The difference between schools is represented by an F-ratio of 6.92 and p < .0001. This means there is a significant difference in the mean torts grades of different schools, and that this difference would be a matter of chance less than once in ten thousand times. Torts grades differ significantly from school to school. Among schools with substantial numbers of respondents, where the volunteers bias may be less significant, there is a correspondence between torts grade and the pre-law school predictors of law school success, the undergraduate gradepoint average and the Law School Admissions Test score. Michigan and Texas generally admit students with unusually high grades and scores. Their mean grades rank high. John Marshall admits students with lower LSAT scores and prelaw school grades; the mean grade there is low. Nevertheless, the most stable means reflect only the difference between a high C and a low C. It is hotly debated how much the undergraduate grade-point average and the LSAT score actually predict law school success. At the University of Michigan it is the rare student who fails. Not so at John Marshall. That most law schools have admitted ''better prepared" students with increasingly higher scores cannot be wholly lost on law professors at grading time. Figure 10.2 shows the ranking of schools by mean scores on the authoritarianism test (F-ratio = 4.25,· p < .0001). Again

92 Corollary Tests and Analyses

Figure 10.1. Comparison of Twenty Law Schools by Torts Grades a

Not included in our analyses because of small sample size.

Differences among Law Schools

Figure 10.2. Comparison of Twenty Law Schools by Authoritarianism Scores a

Not included in our analyses because of small sample size.

93

94 Corollary Tests and Analyses this means that authoritarianism is greater at some schools than others and this difference would be a matter of chance less than once in ten thousand times. If we consider only schools with big samples of respondents, we can still not simplify the rankings. Very tentatively we advance the possibility that students attending southeastern schools may have something in common with students at the professional, rather than academic, Kent and John Marshall schools. They are devoted less to academic study and more to law practice. They are more concerned with the proper exercise of legal authority and less concerned with the alternative-seeking, anti-authoritarian character of academic studies. A similar pattern may hold for the legalism ranking in Figure 10.3. Southeastern schools and eastern professional schools have higher legalism scores. The opportunism ranking in Figure 10.4 shows, as we might expect, a reverse of the authoritarianism and legalism patterns. In the terms of this study, opportunism is polypathic, while authoritarianism and legalism are more monopathic. In the ranking changes that occur, Michigan and Texas, two more academic schools, move up the ranks considerably. Again, the interpretations of the data that we offer are merely explanatory. To permit firmer conclusions, the terms professional and academic need to be defined in much more detail than we have done, and we need an increase in sample size at certain schools. There was no statistically significant difference between schools in intolerance of ambiguity test scores. Table 10.1 shows that any difference in intolerance scores is likely to be a matter of chance. Figure 10.5 presents, for the sake of comparison with other variables, the rank order of the schools by intolerance of ambiguity scores. The responses by school on the cognitive self-image tests appear in Figures 10.6 and 10.7. The students at all schools were quite similar in the differences between self and peers and between self and lawyers. While we found significant differences among schools in self-images, the low scores suggest

Differences among Law Schools

Figure 10.3. Comparison of Twenty Law Schools by Legalism Scores a

Not included in our analyses because of small sample size.

95

96 Corollary Tests and Analyses

Figure 10.4. Comparison of Twenty Law Schools by Opportunism Scores a

Not included in our analyses because of small sample size.

Differences among Law Schools

Figure 10.5. Comparison of Twenty Law Schools by Intolerance-of-Ambiguity Scores a

Not included in our analyses because of small sample size.

97

98 Corollary Tests and Analyses Table 10.1. Mean Scores on All Tests by Law Schools Law School

Legalism

Intolerance of Ambiguity

Authoritarianism

Brooklyn Law School

61.29

36.82

29.65

Capital University (Columbus, Ohio)

59.90

35.65

30.42

University of Detroit

60.29

34.36

29.93

Duquesne University (Pittsburgh)

59.69

34.03

29.52

Golden Gate University (San Francisco)

50.59

33.88

26.35

Hofstra University (Hempstead, N.Y.)

58.67

35.67

29.67

John Marshall Law School (Chicago)

60.49

35.59

31.28

Kent University (Chicago)

57.50

34.10

31.27

Loyola University (Los Angeles)

56.08

34.00

26.54

University of Michigan (Ann Arbor)

56.45

34.63

29.32

University of Mississippi (Oxford)

60.50

36.25

33.31

Note: After reversing certain items to adjust for semantic reversals, the items on each test were summed. On cognitive self-image tests, the absolute value of differences between scores for each item were summed.

99

Differences among Law Schools

Opportunism

Anxiety

Cognitive Self-image Tests ML-Y a MLS-Y b ML-MLS c

Torts Grade

η

6ο.53

59·12

16.94

13.06

4.24

17d

57.10

55.63

17.50

12.94

13.43

3.38

48

59.14

53.50

20.07

19.07

15.45

3.64

14d

59.66

57.59

17.79

13.48

16.86

3.31

29

62.71

57.53

19.82

16.59

15.94

3.65

17d

56.33

58.33

23.67

24.33

14.00

3.67

3d

60.25

57.86

16.31

13.21

13.73

3.15

118

63.05

55.91

19.05

15.64

16.77

3.80

22

56.23

56.08

22.23

19.00

16.92

4.23

13d

59.23

58.62

19.53

15.81

14.46

3.90

60

60.61

56.26

12.68

12.02

11.54

3.37

114

13.18

continued on pp. 100-101 a

c "Most lawyers" minus "you." "Most lawyers" minus "most law students." "Most law students" minus "you." d Not included in our analyses because of small n.

b

100 Corollary Tests and Analyses Table 10.1 (con't). Mean Scores on All Tests by Law Schools Law School

Legalism

Intolerance of Ambiguity

Authoritarianism

University of Missouri-Kansas City

58.50

35.25

25.25

University of Montana (Missoula)

59.32

34.74

28.11

University of Nebraska (Lincoln)

57.55

34.71

30.45

University of Northern Kentucky (Covington)

62.40

36.77

31.77

University of San Diego

59.07

35.59

29.07

Southern Illinois University (Carbondale)

57.54

35.50

29.79

Suffolk University (Boston)

61.77

37.50

30.00

University of Texas (Austin)

57.63

34.57

30.36

University of Toledo

59.95

35.24

28.86

Mean of means

58.76

35.24

29.55