Personality type and judicial decision makng

• Author: John W. Kennedy, Jr.
• Position: Judge of the Superior Courts of California (retired)
• Pages: 50-67

PERSONALITY TYPE

AND JUDICIAL DECISION MAKNG

JUDGE JOHN W. KENNEDY, JR.*

Until about ten years ago, judicial education in most

states consisted primarily of substantive courses dealing with

discrete areas of law. The main goal of most judicial

education was, and continues to be, to teach “the law”. In a

departure from traditional judicial education programs, in

1984, the California Center for Judicial Education (CJER)

established a small committee of judges to design a course

dealing with judicial fact finding and decision making. The

goal of the course was to help judges examine their

individual fact finding and decision-making styles and, as a

result of subjecting them to objective examination, improve

upon them. In designing the course, the faculty sought a

psychological measuring device that would be nonthreatening

to judges, inexpensive, relatively easy to administer, and

focused on cognitive and judgment processes.

The Myers-Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI) was

identified as the most appropriate psychometric tool for this

purpose, and several CJER faculty members, including the

author of this article, completed the Association for

Psychological Type’s (APT) certification process to

administer and interpret the MBTI. The MBTI is

administered worldwide to several million people a year has

been translated into numerous foreign languages. It is widely

used throughout industry, government, education, and

religion.

The MBTI has long been considered useful in team

building, management, marriage counselling, and job

2002] Personality Type and Judicial Decision Making 50

* Judge of the Superior Courts of California (retired). This article is

reprinted with permission from Volume 37 No. 3, Summer 1998 of The

Judges’ Journal.

placement. Within the judicial context, it has been found to

have unique application to judges handling family and

juvenile law, and has been used specifically in judicial

education programs targeted to those groups. During the past

ten years, I have administered the MBTI to more than 1,300

judges across the United States in the dozens of judicial

training programs that I have taught. For my purposes, I have

found it to be extremely helpful in my course work on

judicial fact finding and decision making. However, its use in

California judicial education has even expanded beyond fact

finding and decision making, to include faculty training,

collegiality, court management, stress and time management.

In this article, I will share my experience in using the

MBTI to assess the impact of personality type on judicial fact

finding and decision making.

I. THE MEASUREMENT TOOL

The MBTI is a pencil-to-paper self-administered

inventory. It is an “inventory” in that it counts the number of

responses in various areas of cognitive and judgmental

functioning. It is not a “test” because there are no right or

wrong answers. The MBTI consists of a total of 126 items. It

is divided into three parts. The first and third parts are

multiple choice, and the second part requires the subject to

choose from a pair of words. It can be administered in either

a self-scoring form, or scored by template. The inventory

takes approximately 30-45 minutes to administer.

The results of the MBTI are scored on four scales that

identify and quantify preferences between (1) extroversion

and introversion; (2) sensing and intuition; (3) thinking and

feeling; and (4) judging and perceiving. It is important to note

that the MBTI measures preference, not skill or competence.

I will not provide a detailed description or explanation of

these scales here, as there are dozens of books and other

resources that provide such information with more

51 Judicial Studies Institute Journal [2:2