Source of article 2's Company - Magnus Insights.

As I have stated in previous posts, I have had an interesting career, primarily because I have spent almost all of my professional life working with attorneys instead of with colleagues. Furthermore, my definition of “colleague” is narrow, in that I consider only other social psychologists as colleagues. The field of psychology is large, with most psychologists working in clinical practice and relatively few defining themselves as social psychologists or social/personality psychologists. Even larger than the profession of psychology is the legal profession. As a point of comparison, there are over 133,000 members of the American Psychological Association, while the American Bar Association has almost 200,000 members (with approximately 14% of lawyers belonging to the ABA). Most of my colleagues in social psychology work in academic settings, conducting research, publishing articles in professional journals, and teaching graduate and undergraduate students. Although some of us work in applied settings, such as in marketing research, with the military, and like me, as consultants in private industry, the vast majority of my colleagues have no “real world” experience. Lawyers, in contrast, have a more technically oriented and practical education that focuses on learning how to practice law. Just as there are many distinct types of psychologists, lawyers work in a variety of sub areas, such as probate, family, and like all of Magnus’ clients, trial law. The educational and career experiences of psychologists and attorneys are vastly different, with psychologists focusing more on science and lawyers making decisions based on legal precedents. As a result of this, we social psychologists see the world, and the people in it, in different, often conflicting, ways from the attorneys who become our clients. For example, when selecting a jury, many attorneys use “gut feelings,” past experiences, and a desire to please the judge by expediting the jury selection process. As a social psychologist, these concepts never cross my mind. Instead, I am focused on selecting a jury in a manner that is in opposition to many of my clients: I concentrate on de-selecting everyone I believe will be biased against my client’s side of the case, leaving in place the rest of the jurors. I am cognizant of the chess game that plays out when the attorneys exercise their challenges for cause and peremptory strikes, including who moves onto the jury when someone is excused. Fortunately for me, most of my clients accept my advice and understand that, although they are experts on the law, I am an expert on the human dynamics of litigation. When this happens, I am glad to have spent my career with people who are not my colleagues!