Education in increasing empathy may be of interest to law students because the legal practice shows it is an important competency for legal practitioners to be able to put themselves in other people’s shoes. Tilburg Law School therefore gave external PhD researcher Ingemarie Sam the opportunity to investigate whether the method of Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) can contribute to developing this competency. As part of VTS, participants in a group are invited to share their interpretations of a work of art. The method has been shown to offer an exercise in adopting different perspectives, which is important in increasing empathy.
Research has shown that VTS contributes to the development of empathy in medical students. The method especially increases critical thinking, observation, and communication skills. For law students, the development of empathy is important because, in legal and medical practice alike, practitioners often encounter data and situations that can be interpreted in different ways.
Moreover, since the Dutch Childcare Benefits Scandal, increasing attention in the legal sciences has been paid to "engaged, responsive judgments" and "people-centered justice".
This means that, in addition to their legal knowledge, judges use knowledge of the values and interests of those involved to reach a fair judgment. According to this approach, legal practitioners and legislators should be aware of the situation of the citizen and the effects of legal decisions for citizens. The latest competency models for legal curriculums therefore pay attention to emotional intelligence, which empathy is part of.
The VTS method
Central to the VTS method is learning to exchange perspectives, which is important in developing empathy. Empathy consists of being able to understand and feel for a person’s situation (cognitive and emotional empathy, respectively), whereby a person is aware of the distinction between the self and the other. As part of the VTS method, a trained moderator, called a facilitator, leads a group conversation on a work of art that can be experienced and interpreted in different ways.
In the context of her study, Sam organized VTS classes for first-year and third-year Bachelor’s students of Tilburg Law School. These students then completed a questionnaire to study the effect of the classes. The same questionnaire was administered to first-year students who had not had any VTS classes.
Results
Sam did not find a difference between first-years who had and those who had not had the VTS classes. However, third-year male students proved to have developed more empathy after the VTS classes. This effect was less clear for female third-years, but their empathy scores were already higher than those of the male students before the VTS training. In addition, the reflections of the third-year students on their VTS experience show that VTS helps to see, and be open to, different perspectives. Students did report finding it difficult, at first, to share their opinions if they were not sure that it was the right answer. The role of the facilitator is therefore essential in creating a safe environment.
Further research will have to show in what conditions VTS can be successfully implemented in law curriculums.
PhD Defense
Ingemarie Sam defends her thesis on this topic on Monday, December 9, 2024, at 13:30 hrs. in the Tilburg University Auditorium. The defense can also be watched via livestream . Title of PhD thesis: Examining empathy training in legal education through Visual Thinking Strategies. An analytical and evaluative study. PhD supervisor: Prof. M. Adams, co-supervisors: Dr. H. van Dijk MA and Dr. M. IJzermans.
