ABSTRACT
Psychologists have been interested in the implications of their work for the legal system since the early years of the last century when in 1908, Hugo Munsterberg published a book entitled “On the Witness Stand”. Munsterberg was a German psychologist who became one of the first appointments to the newly developed department in Harvard. He was an enthusiastic experimentalist who favoured taking psychology out of the laboratory and applying it to practical problems, unlike his professor William James, who was more attracted to the philosophical implications of the subject, and who seems to have regarded experiments as rather boring. Happily James also liked to have around him talented people with different views. Many of the points made in Munsterberg’s book are sadly all too familiar today, as when he warned against “the blind confidence in the observations of the average normal man” and argued strongly against the current ways of interrogating suspects, commenting that “brutality is still the favoured method of undermining the mental resistance of the accused”. He went on to argue that “the method is ineffective in bringing out the real truth”, with the result that “crimes that were never committed have been confessed, infamous lies have been invented, to satisfy the demands of the torturers”, alas, a claim that could still be made today, all too frequently.
