Hugo Münsterberg had a large impact on forensic psychology. The judges ignore the fact that with the same accuracy their common-sense can be transformed into careful measurements the results of which may widely differ from haphazard opinion. Last winter I made, quite by the way, a little experiment with the students of my regular psychology course in Harvard. When he left the hospital his hip was healed, but the poor fellow could not sleep without the drug, and from day to day the dose had to be increased -- he was a morphinist, an outcast, without energy and without hope. The result was that when I threw in the word "candy" again, she needed 4.5 seconds, and the outcome was the naïve association "never." They are not expected to know that such a faint light would still allow the blue colour sensation to come in, while the red colour sensation would have disappeared. As mistakes there were counted the omissions, the wrong additions and the alterations. The untrustworthiness of memory under all such conditions has nothing whatever to do with the intentions and the veracity of the witness. All the words before had evidently meant for her simply objects; but "candy" seemed to appeal to her as a hint, a question, a reproach, which she wanted to repudiate. I am most seriously convinced that it is a tragedy not only of crime but also of human error and miscarried justice, and my scientific conscience as a psychologist compels me to speak of it because the tragedy of yesterday may come up again, in some other form, to-morrow.I am the last one to desire for the modern psychologist a special privilege to meddle with the daily affairs of practical life. But most important is the third direction of inquiry: more characteristic than the choice and the constancy of the associations is their involuntary retardation by emotional influence. The description, on the other hand, called it: soft, mellow, humming, deep, dull, solemn, resonant, penetrating, full, rumbling, clear, low; but then again, rough, sharp, whistling, and so on. The psychologist therefore asks: What influences have the power to reinforce the impulse? Such conditions are not to be found on the witness stand under the excitement of the solemn court procedure; there the resistance of the adult persons may sink to the low level of that of the boys and girls. In fact, he participated in several legal trials. We hear the witnesses talking about the taste of poisoned liquids, and there is probably no one in the jury-box who knows enough of physiological psychology to be aware that the same substance may taste quite differently on different parts of the tongue. Has this perhaps depended on the nervous disposition of the crowd at various epochs? Their mind is disturbed by Roentgen rays or wireless telegraphy or hypnotic influence from a distance. That is amusing, indeed -- because hardly anyone who is interested in the psychology of hypnotic states has sought and used so constantly the chance to ridicule the belief in a special "hypnotic power." Our own doings, of which we know, perhaps, through our muscle sensations, are in themselves no better material for our reproduction in memory than the scenes which we have seen and the words which we have heard. Education and art, politics and religion, rely on the power of suggestion, for a suggestion is after all any idea which takes hold of our consciousness in such a way that it inhibits and excludes the opposite ideas. Everything which strengthens family life and works against its dissolution, everything which gives the touch of personal sympathy to the forlorn, helps towards the prevention of crime. All are to have the same handle, and if one after the other is lifted with closed eyes, all of course appear of equal heaviness. Public opinion, and court and jury as its organs, are always inclined to claim that whole borderland field still for the normal life and to acknowledge the mental disturbance only when the disease region is entered. The lady spoke the next few words in a stammering way; but then she rushed on and told us that she had not expected to find such a company, but that her real purpose in coming was to report to me that she had selected me as her heir and that now she wanted accordingly to make her last will. They deal essentially with the mind of the witness on the witness stand; only the last, on the prevention of crime, takes another direction. She was again not aware that she had betrayed the path of her imagination. They looked at each picture for fifteen seconds and then wrote a full report of everything they could remember. There are others with whom every tune can easily resound in recollection and who can hardly read a letter of a friend without hearing his voice in every word, while they are utterly unable to awake an optical image. Ann Foster at Salem Village confessed in 1692 that the devil appeared to her in the shape of a bird at several times. He would have been absolutely unable to fabricate by his own efforts such scientifically exact observations. A picture of a farmer's room was shown to about forty persons, children and adults. Everyone knows in daily life the type of the superficial, silly person whose attention is always shifting, and yet it is only an absurd exaggeration of such behaviour that characterises the alienation of the maniac. Still greater pre the changes in mechanical memorising, which is at first greatly facilitated and in calculation, which suffers from the first. The one said that the automobile was running very slowly; the other, that he had never seen an automobile rushing more rapidly. Enough of my class-room experiments. Not only the self-made psychology of the average juryman, but also the scanty psychological statements which judge and attorney find in the large compendiums on Evidence fall to pieces if a careful examination approaches the mental facts. In the last few decades, then, has arisen the new science, experimental psychology, which, like physics and chemistry, has its own workshops, wherein mental facts are brought under experimental test in the same way as in the natural sciences. There appeared, for instance, the word "thief." It showed that the medium, famous for her slate tricks, was right when she asserted that as soon as she succeeded in turning the attention of her client to the slate in her hand, he would not notice if an elephant should pass behind her through the room. Experimental psychology has at last cleared the ground, and to ignore this whole science and to be satisfied with the primitive psychology of common sense seems really out of order when crime and punishment are in question and the analysis of the mind of the witness might change the whole aspect of the case. I ask my subjects, for instance, to make rhythmical finger movements by which a weight is lifted, and the apparatus in which the arm rests records exactly the amount of every contraction. We might expect from such a subject very little lengthening of the simple association-time by emotion, but instead of it a considerable lengthening by conscious effort to avoid suspicious and dangerous associations, provided that he were anxious to hide the damaging truth. A word we hear may excite us and at once the needle of the galvanometer becomes restless: there is no more uncanny betrayal of our inmost mind. The police and every one about the house had always taken as a matter of course that the entrance was made by a cellar window, as it would have been much more difficult to use the locked doors. Like many other branches of experimental psychology, the doctrine of association has become adjusted to the practical problems of education, of medicine, of art, of commerce, and of law. Yes, we fill the blanks of our perceptions constantly with bits of reproduced memory material and take those reproductions for immediate impressions. First, I showed to the men some pairs of coloured paper squares, and they had ample time to write down which of the two appeared to them darker. We call the readiness to receive such suggestions from other persons suggestibility. But, to be sure, when the Court of public opinion begins to weigh the evidence, it is no longer law, but politics, and it might not be wise to ask how far there is suggestion in politics too, inasmuch as we might be checked too soon by the counter question: Is there anything in politics which is not suggestion? On such an experimental basis only can we hope for regulation and improvement; a sweeping proscription, of course, might be reached without laboratory studies: simply to forbid everything is easy, but such radicalism is practically impossible as far as the evidence of fatigue or poverty is concerned, and perhaps possible but unwise as far as the stimulants are in question. Münsterberg encountered immense turmoil with the outbreak of the First World War. I receive thus one hundred associations which are independent of any intentional selection, showing just the paths of least resistance in the mind of my man. 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