When you have to apply a rule to a person whose story moves you, give yourself the instruction judges give juries: acknowledge the feeling, then decide each required element on the evidence, in writing, and check the result by imagining the same facts with a different person. (Educational; not legal advice.)

How to do it

1. 1Name the feeling to yourself without fighting it: "I feel sorry for her", "I dislike him". Sympathy and antipathy are normal and you are not asked to stop having them; you are asked not to let them decide a question they are not evidence about.
2. 2Write down what actually has to be decided. In a trial these are the elements in the judge's instructions; in a workplace, school, or benefits decision they are the criteria in the policy. Decide each one separately and note the evidence you relied on.
3. 3Run the swap test. Keep every fact the same and change the person: make the sympathetic party unlikable, or reverse the parties' appearance, wealth, or background. If your answer changes, the change is coming from somewhere other than the evidence.
4. 4Separate the stages. Whether something happened, and whether the rule was broken, is one question. What should be done about it (damages, sentence, sanction, mercy) is another, and sympathy often has a legitimate place in the second where it has none in the first.
5. 5Be especially careful with the single vivid detail: a photograph, a crying witness, a child. Ask what it proves about the elements.
6. 6In a group, say the instruction out loud once: "We all feel for the family. The question we were given is whether the defendant was negligent."

When to use it

• •You are a juror, an arbitrator, a panel member, or a manager applying a rule to an individual case.
• •One party is much more appealing, or much more pitiable, than the other.
• •An advocate spends more time on who the person is than on what happened.
• •You notice that you have reached a conclusion and are now looking for the reasons.

Counters

Evidence and how strong it is

Instructions telling jurors not to be swayed by sympathy, prejudice, or public opinion are standard in US pattern jury instructions, and the Supreme Court upheld such an instruction in the penalty phase of a capital case in California v. Brown (1987). The evidence that instructions work as intended is mixed at best. Reviews of jury-instruction research find that jurors often misunderstand instructions and that admonitions are an imperfect control on extra-legal influences (Lieberman & Sales 1997); a meta-analysis found that instructions to disregard inadmissible material do not reliably remove its effect (Steblay et al. 2006). The influences themselves are well documented: identifiable, vivid individuals elicit more generosity than statistical ones (Small, Loewenstein & Slovic 2007), and jurors organize evidence into stories whose coherence drives verdicts (Pennington & Hastie 1992). The specific steps here borrow from debiasing research: deciding element by element imposes structure on a holistic impression, and the swap test is a version of consider-the-opposite, which has experimental support (Lord, Lepper & Preston 1984). No study tests this routine with jurors. Evidence strength: the problem is well established; the remedy is an extrapolation from general debiasing findings and should be regarded as a reasonable discipline, not a proven one.

1. Supreme Court of the United States (1987). California v. Brown, 479 U.S. 538. United States Reports
   The decision upholding an instruction that jurors not be swayed by mere sentiment, conjecture, sympathy, passion, prejudice, public opinion, or public feeling.
2. Lieberman, J. D., & Sales, B. D. (1997). What social science teaches us about the jury instruction process. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 3(4), 589-644
   Review finding that jurors frequently misunderstand instructions and that admonitions imperfectly control extra-legal influences.
3. Small, D. A., Loewenstein, G., & Slovic, P. (2007). Sympathy and callousness: The impact of deliberative thought on donations to identifiable and statistical victims. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 102(2), 143-153
   Experimental evidence of the identifiable-victim effect and of how deliberation alters sympathy-driven responses.
4. Pennington, N., & Hastie, R. (1992). Explaining the evidence: Tests of the Story Model for juror decision making. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 62(2), 189-206
   Evidence that jurors decide by constructing stories, which is why element-by-element review is a useful counterweight.
5. Lord, C. G., Lepper, M. R., & Preston, E. (1984). Considering the opposite: A corrective strategy for social judgment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 47(6), 1231-1243
   Experimental support for the consider-the-opposite strategy on which the swap test is modeled.