On The Witness Stand

MÑŒnsterberg, Hugo. (1908). On the Witness Stand. New York: McClure Company.

For this book report, I decided to read Hugo MÑŒnsterberg's On the Witness Stand. This book contains essays on psychology and crime and eyewitness testimony. Today this book is used as a reference for many issues in forensic psychology. For this report, I focused on two chapters of the book: Illusions and the Memory of the Witness. I am going to first summarize the two chapters I read then talk about what was going on at the time this book was written. I will then report some of the research in the book, and finish with my opinion on how this book has contributed to the literature and how it relates to the current knowledge of forensic psychology.

Illusions

The chapter on illusions starts out with a couple different scenarios in which MÑŒnsterberg describes how witnesses viewed what was going on. In the first scenario, he talked of an automobile accident and in which two individuals witnessed. He said that both of the witnesses were respectable people, yet their recollections of the road conditions, how fast the automobile was traveling, and how many bystanders were present varied greatly. The second scenario described the time between a whistle signal and the noise of an explosion. Again two witnesses were present and each one's description of the scene was significantly different. In the final scenario described, one that took place on the sea-shore, one witness claimed that it was a women and a child standing by the sea shore, whereas another witness claimed that he saw a man with his dog. These scenarios are all pointing in the same direction and that is: witnesses to any kind of event disagree about certain important details about what just took place because of the way they perceive the event taking place.

This lead MÑŒnsterberg to wonder if all individuals perceive the same thing and do the things we perceive all have the same meaning attached to them. In turn, is the court system aware of all of the differences between men's perceptions? MÑŒnsterberg also questioned memory and the demand that is put on the memory of witnesses. To try find out the answer to some of his questions, MÑŒnsterberg conducted a couple experiments with students enrolled in one of his psychology courses at Harvard. These studies will be talked about in detail a little later.

The chapter on illusions comes to a close with a few ending results from the experiments MÑŒnsterberg conducted. He stated in everyone of our observations, associations, judgments, and suggestions of our own makes there way in. He continues to say that children always believe what they see, but really what they see may not be true, it may be an illusion. And further he says that we tend to overlook things that may change the meaning of something completely.

A final note on the chapter of illusions stated by MÑŒnsterberg is that "Experimental psychology has at last cleared the ground, and do 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." With this statement, MÑŒnsterberg hoped for the courtroom to come nearer to this truth and for them to share the word onto others.

The Memory of the Witness

Once again, MÑŒnsterberg starts off this chapter with a scenario in which he has been called upon as a witness in a trial. A few days after the trial, MÑŒnsterberg realized that one of his statements, he said while under oath, was incorrect. After analyzing that statement, he realized that many of his statements were incorrectly reported. He knew that he had surveyed the scene rather quickly, but he thought to himself, how could his memory have failed like this and how could his imagination supplement his mind with false memories? MÑŒnsterberg's answer to why he made had made so many errors was that even though a person may have a good memory, there are a series of things (confusions, illusions, forgetting, wrong conclusions, and suggestion) that came into play when he was a witness. He went further to say that this not only happened him, but also happens all the time to other witnesses around the world. Witnesses mix up truth and untruth and come up with wrong conclusions. He was an example of this.

MÑŒnsterberg goes on to talk about the different types of memory. To him, memory could be grouped as visual, acoustical, and motor types. Individuals may have excellent memory for one type, but may fail when they have to rely on another form. Still another attribute of memory is that there are variations in memory, which can be discriminated. And with this MÑŒnsterberg said that the courts will have to learn to take individual differences into account when interviewing on the witness stand because no two witnesses will be able to come up with the exact same conclusion.

MÑŒnsterberg ends this chapter by saying that you cannot only rely on individual differences and the discrimination of memory types but you also have to take into account the new facts of memory variations that have come out of the experiments on attention and inhibition.

Now that I have summarized the chapters I read in On the Witness Stand I want talk a little bit about what was going on in psychology during this time.

Hugo MÑŒnsterberg was a student of Wundt's at the University of Leipzig. The psychology lab that MÑŒnsterberg worked in while at Leipzig was the only one in the world. By the end of the nineteenth century, MÑŒnsterberg had developed his own lab in Frieburg and by the time that this book was published (1908) about