Law students look like everyone else — with one revealing exception

An analysis of VIA Character Strengths scores from 491 law students (one in Massachusetts, one in Kentucky), measured against a 4,070-person general-population sample. Ruth Pearce, JD, PCC, PMP.

The character strengths of law students are nearly identical to the general population’s — same profile, same internal structure — with four small but real exceptions. Law students score lower on forgiveness, teamwork, and love of learning, and higher on humor. That matters because it punctures a widespread and expensive assumption: that lawyers are a distinct personality type, wired differently from everyone else. On the evidence here, they are not. They are ordinary people with three strengths running slightly low and one — humor — running high. And humor is the one most worth thinking about, because the research shows it helps and harms in legal work depending entirely on how it is used.

Why this is worth a practitioner’s attention

The belief that lawyers possess a characteristic temperament — skeptical, autonomous, low in warmth — underwrites a good deal of hiring lore, professional-development spending, and self-explanation within the profession. If that belief were simply false, it would be worth knowing. This analysis does not claim lawyers are identical to everyone else on every dimension, but it does show that across 24 measured character strengths, law students diverge from the general population only modestly, and mostly in the direction of having less of a strength rather than a distinctive abundance of one. The practical upshot: character-strength differences are a weak foundation for explaining what makes lawyers lawyers — with the single, usable exception of humor, discussed below.

Data and method

VIA Character Strengths scores (a 1–5 scale across 24 strengths), drawn from a single assessment version. After removing duplicate records and retaining each person’s most recent assessment, the sample comprises 4,561 individuals: 237 at a Massachusetts law school, 254 at a Kentucky law school, and 4,070 general population (excluding the two law schools, though the general group may contain some lawyers).

The analysis uses scores rather than rankings, and frames every comparison as law relative to the general baseline rather than in absolute terms. Both choices are deliberate and material; the second because the familiar “lawyers lead with fairness and judgment” pattern is population-wide, not a feature of law. The first — the case for scores over ranks — is demonstrated in the appendix, because using ranks would change the conclusions.

Differences are reported as Cohen’s d (a standardized effect size) rather than as statistical significance. With a general sample above 4,000, almost any difference clears a significance threshold, so significance is uninformative here; effect size, which measures how large a difference actually is, is the honest unit. The 1–5 scores are treated as interval data for this purpose, consistent with common practice for the VIA inventory. One note on reading effect sizes: a gap that looks small against the 1–5 scale can be a substantial effect relative to how much individuals actually vary. The 0.36-point difference on forgiveness, for example, is about half a standard deviation (d = −0.49) — because the effect size measures the gap against the spread of people, not against the width of the scale.

The two law schools match, and can be combined

The two schools were compared before pooling. Across all 24 strengths, the largest difference between the schools was Prudence, at a small effect (d = 0.34); every other strength was smaller, most negligible. The profiles track one another in shape and order.

Figure 1. The two schools' strength profiles are nearly identical; the largest between-school gap is a small effect. Pooling them into a single law sample is therefore justified. — Figure 1. The two schools’ strength profiles are nearly identical; the largest between-school gap is a small effect. Pooling them into a single law sample is therefore justified.

Finding 1: law students barely differ from the general population

No strength reaches even a medium difference (conventionally d = 0.5). The entire law-vs-general story is four small effects.

Strength	Law	General	d	Direction
Forgiveness	3.31	3.67	−0.49	law lower
Teamwork	3.52	3.80	−0.44	law lower
Love of Learning	3.79	4.00	−0.31	law lower
Humor	3.97	3.76	+0.26	law higher

These four are the only strengths that clear even the small-effect threshold (d = 0.2). A handful of others — social intelligence, love, curiosity — tilt very slightly higher for law students, but at magnitudes too small to treat as real. Everything else, fairness, honesty, judgment, self-regulation and zest included, differs between the groups by a negligible amount. The striking result is how little separates law students from everyone else.

Figure 2. Law-vs-general differences by effect size. Only four strengths cross even the small-effect threshold (dashed lines); the rest cluster near zero.

Figure 3. The full 24-strength profile. For almost every strength the two bars are nearly equal — a portrait of how ordinary the law-student profile is.

In plainer terms

Share of each group scoring below the general population’s median on the four distinctive strengths:

Forgiveness: 66% of law students fall below the general median, vs 44% of the general population.
Teamwork: 56% below, vs 36%.
Love of Learning: 53% below, vs 40%.
Humor: law students are less likely to fall below median (32% vs 39%).

Finding 2: humor — the one place law students stand out

Of the four differences, three are deficits. Humor is the only strength on which law students meaningfully exceed the general population. The effect is small (d = +0.26), but it is the sole upward exception in an otherwise lower-or-equal profile, and it holds across both schools.

Figure 4. Humor scores by group. Both schools sit above the general-population mean — the one strength that runs this direction.

One distinction matters before drawing on the humor literature. The VIA inventory measures humor as a disposition — a self-reported tendency toward playfulness and seeing the light side. It does not measure how a person deploys humor in a given setting. The research below concerns deployed humor in legal contexts; it is offered to explain why an elevated disposition is worth attention, not as a claim about how these particular students use humor. With that boundary stated, three strands of evidence bear on a population of law students.

In the classroom, humor is a genuine resource — conditionally

Law students carry documented and elevated rates of anxiety and depression relative to other graduate students and the general population. Against that backdrop, the pedagogical evidence Simon synthesizes is encouraging: content-related humor, delivered in moderate dose, measurably improves retention and lowers student anxiety — in one controlled study, a humor condition outperformed a no-humor condition by roughly ten points on a final exam. But the benefit is confined to affiliative humor used sparingly; aggressive humor — teasing, targeting, ridicule — predicts worse wellbeing and lower self-esteem, and too much humor of any kind drowns the content it was meant to carry. An elevated disposition toward humor is a resource only if it takes the right form.

In the courtroom, the same trait carries real risk

Where the classroom can reward humor, the adversarial setting punishes its misjudgment. Analyzing laughter across roughly 400 Supreme Court oral arguments, Urbatsch finds two patterns that should give any humor-forward advocate pause: humor is markedly less frequent in cases touching an individual’s life or liberty — the room polices levity precisely where the human stakes are highest — and the side that generates more laughter tends to lose, with judicial humor most often functioning as a dismissive signal toward an argument the justices have already discounted. The practitioner literature reaches the same place from experience: humor demands reading the room, and a misjudged joke can forfeit standing an advocate cannot easily recover.

The through-line: humor is the most context-dependent strength law students have

Taken together, the evidence describes a strength that is genuinely double-edged in law. It builds rapport and lowers anxiety in a classroom; it can trivialize and undercut in a hearing. It is an asset among peers and a liability in front of a vulnerable client — a point that surfaces readily in practice, where the strength an advocate is proudest of can be exactly the one to leave at the door of a guardianship or capacity proceeding. That law students arrive with more of this particular strength is therefore neither good news nor bad; it is a reason to treat humor as the strength most in need of deliberate, situational use — and the one genuinely actionable finding in this analysis.

Finding 3: law students’ strengths cluster the same way everyone’s do

Beyond individual strengths, one can ask whether strengths relate to one another differently in law students. They do not. Across all 276 strength-pairs, the largest difference between the law and general correlation structures is 0.16 — small. Fairness and zest, for instance, correlate +0.12 among law students and +0.20 in the general population: weak in both, with no meaningful law-specific pattern.

Figure 5. Strength correlations among law students. Darker cells mark stronger positive relationships — the familiar VIA clusters.

Figure 6. The same map for the general population. The pattern is strikingly similar to Figure 5.

Figure 7. The difference between the two (law minus general). Near-white throughout indicates nearly identical structure; faint colour concentrates in the Forgiveness row and column — the one strength where law genuinely stands apart.

Reading these results responsibly

The analysis is cross-sectional: a single snapshot, not a before-and-after. The lower forgiveness, teamwork, and love-of-learning scores are real, but the data cannot distinguish whether legal training erodes those strengths or whether people lower in them self-select into law. Separating the two would require following the same individuals over time. The differences are claimed here; their causes are not.

Two further notes of proportion. The effects are small, and the smallness is itself the finding: it runs against the common assumption that lawyers are temperamentally a breed apart. And one limitation worth naming for any further use: the general sample is defined only as “excluding law,” and has not been matched to the law sample on age or education, so some portion of these differences could reflect those factors rather than law itself.

The one line

Law students’ character looks much like everyone else’s — with forgiveness, teamwork, and love of learning running a little lower, and humor the single place they rise above the baseline. Humor is the strength to use most deliberately, because in law it helps and harms depending entirely on the room.

References

Simon, D. J. (2021). Laughing Your Way to Academic Success: Can Laughter Impact Learning and Well-Being in the Law School Classroom? Connecticut Law Review, 53(2), Online Edition.
Urbatsch, R. (2022). Humor in Supreme Court oral arguments. HUMOR, 35(2), 169–187.
Browning, J. G. Humor in the courtroom: No laughing matter. ABA Journal. See also Williams, C. (2026). No Laughing Matter: Humor’s Place in Legal Pedagogy. Above the Law.

Appendix

Why scores, and not rankings

The same VIA assessment yields both a score (1–5) and a rank (1–24) for each strength. This analysis uses scores throughout. The choice is not cosmetic: analyzing the ranks would have produced different — and misleading — conclusions.

Rankings are ipsative: forcing every person to order their 24 strengths means the strengths are defined in competition with one another, so one can only rise in rank if another falls. This builds a structural negative relationship into the data that has nothing to do with the people being measured. The effect is visible immediately: the mean correlation between strengths is +0.21 using scores but collapses to −0.04 using ranks — the same individuals, the same assessment, pushed artificially apart by the ranking format alone.

Figure A1. The same law-student data, correlated two ways. Scores (top) show the real, mostly positive co-occurrence of strengths. Ranks (bottom) wash to artificial negative — an artifact of forced ranking, not a fact about law students.

The consequence is concrete. The relationship between fairness and zest — the specific question that first prompted this analysis — is a weak +0.12 on scores, but flips to −0.21 on ranks. Had the analysis used rankings, it would have “found” that higher fairness goes with lower zest — a tidy, intuitive, and entirely artifactual result manufactured by the measurement format. Scores avoid this by preserving how far apart a person’s strengths actually are, rather than only their order. For any claim about how strengths relate to one another, scores are the defensible choice.

Analysis is descriptive and correlational; it characterises co-occurrence in this data and does not establish cause. Based on VIA Character Strengths scores (1–5), single assessment version, deduplicated to most-recent record per person: 237 at a Massachusetts law school, 254 at a Kentucky law school, 4,070 general population. Prepared with AI assistance; the data, analysis, framing, and interpretation are the author’s.