ABSTRACT
When a person is charged with a crime then a new set of actors enter the drama: the courtroom is the arena in which they perform, playing out decisions of guilt and innocence, liberty and custody, even life and death. While, as Sales and Hafemeister note, ‘Since the 1970s we have witnessed a virtual explosion of interest in the law-psychology interface’ (1985:13), the involvement of psychologists in legal matters has a long history. Bartol and Bartol (1987) trace this history to Cattell’s (1895) study of the psychology of testimony. This was the starting-point for a number of studies (e.g. Binet 1900; Bolton 1896) which eventually accumulated into a substantial body of evidence on witness memory, reviewed annually by Whipple (1909-15; 1917; 1918). Even Freud (1906) showed interest in this new application of psychology, with a paper titled ‘psychoanalysis and the ascertaining of truth in courts of law’. The dominant figure of the period was the American-based German psychologist Hugo Münsterberg who, in 1908, published On the Witness Stand in which he proposed that psychology could be beneficially applied to courtroom issues and procedures. Münsterberg particularly drew attention to the psychologist’s understanding of perception and memory, arguing that this gave the psychologist special insight into witness testimony. Münsterberg’s claims drew fierce attack from the legal profession (Wigmore 1909), and accusations of ‘yellow psychology’ (Moore 1907). As chronicled by historians of the study of witness memory (Greer 1971; Sporer 1982), the late 1920s saw the interests of psychologists (but not lawyers; see M.Brown 1926) turn away from applied memory research. In the 1950s and 1960s only occasional relevant works appeared, with very little in the way of fresh empirical data (Haward 1963; Kubie 1959; J.Marshall 1966; Rouke 1957; Wall 1965). However, the late 1960s and early 1970s saw a full turn of the
cycle, heralded by an upsurge of interest in memory for faces: while much of this work was theoretical in nature, it was but a short step to an applied orientation and a return of the study of eyewitness memory.
