Hugo Münsterberg, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The courts proceed as though the honest witness who swears he saw a thing therefore saw it, and remembers it as it was. Psychology shows this faith to be misplaced. Perception is selective and shaped by expectation; memory is not a photograph but a reconstruction that fades, fills its gaps with inference, and is molded by every suggestive question put to it; the confident witness may be confidently wrong, and the very sincerity of his belief is no guarantee of its truth.
I have shown in the laboratory how easily a remembered scene is distorted, how a leading question implants what was never seen, how an innocent man may be led to a false confession. The law has taken centuries of rules of evidence to guard against the liar; it has scarcely begun to guard against the honest witness who errs.1 The psychologist has a place at the bar of justice — not to replace the judge, but to tell the court what the mind can and cannot faithfully report. Justice that ignores the psychology of testimony is building on sand.2345
All this is a popular illusion against which modern psychology must seriously protest. Justice would less often miscarry if all who are to weigh evidence were more conscious of the treachery of human memory. Yes, it ean be said that, while the court makes the fullest use of all the modern sci- THE MEMORY OF THE WITNESS entific methods when, for instance, a drop of dried.On the Witness Stand, pp. 57–59
The witnesses believed that they were seeing a spontaneous quarrel, or a chance fight, or the accidental intrusion of strangers. Then they were asked to write out a full report. The results have uniformly been that 25 per cent, to 50 per cent, of the statements were erroneous, and that omissions falsified the results throughout.Psychology General and Applied, pp. 399–400
To be sure, the judge may bolster up the' case with preceding decisions, but even if the old decision was justified, is such an amateur psychologist prepared to decide whether the mental situation is really the same in the new case? Such Judicial self-help was unavoidable as long as the 'The study of these powers no longer lies outside of the realm of science.On the Witness Stand, pp. 32–34
'The lawyer alone is obdurate, 'The lawyer and the judge and the juryman are sure that they do not need the experimental psychologist. They do not wish to see that in this field preéminently applied experimental psychology has made strong strides, led by Binet, Stern, Lipmann, Jung, Wertheimer, Gross, Sommer, INTRODUCTION Aschaffenburg, and other scholars.On the Witness Stand, pp. 23–27
Finally, the witness may have lacked the ability to express his ideas correctly. Only if the process were free from disturbances at all these points can the testimony count as an objective report. Each of these sources of mistakes can be examined by the psychologist. It is clear, however, that three different types of psychological facts must be considered.Psychology General and Applied, p. 397
Münsterberg's central forensic claim — that eyewitness memory and perception are far less reliable than the law assumes, and that suggestion and leading questions distort testimony — is strikingly vindicated by the modern science of eyewitness testimony (Loftus and the misinformation effect, false-memory research) and by the DNA- exoneration record, in which mistaken eyewitness identification is the leading cause of wrongful conviction. He founded the field. The contested part is historical and rhetorical: in 1908 his specific claims and his promotion of the psychologist's courtroom role outran the evidence then available and were premature, drawing John Henry Wigmore's celebrated satirical rebuttal on behalf of a legal profession not ready to cede ground. So the vision was right and ahead of its time; the confidence with which he pressed it in his own day was greater than his evidence yet warranted.