474 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



involved in either of these two associated tests; and the man who dis- 

 tinguishes himself in both may, in ordinary life, with his senses and 

 his intellect in their normal state, be a far worse observer and a far 

 worse reporter of the things going on around him than the man who is 

 either too indifferent or too slow-witted to bring his mental and physical 

 faculties to bear adequately upon the artificial test. 



It is far from being the purpose of this paper to cast discredit on 

 the methods of experimental psychology. On the contrary, the writer 

 feels that the advance made by that science has been among the most 

 interesting and important of the scientific developments of the past 

 three decades. In Professor Miinsterberg's succeeding paper, " The 

 Third Degree," for example, are to be found a number of illus- 

 trations of the remarkable results that have been obtained by the 

 methods of experimental psychology. The account of them given 

 by the distinguished professor with that skill and attractiveness 

 of which he is a rare master, while as interesting as a romance, is 

 full of convincing force. The questions there discussed have at once 

 intense theoretical interest and great practical importance; but there 

 is this difference between them and the questions at issue in the paper I 

 have been criticizing: In worming out of a suspect, or a hysterical pati- 

 ent, the secret he is endeavoring to guard, the thing under examination 

 by the expert is highly definite. It is something in the actual con- 

 tents of the subject's mind or in his emotional susceptibility on cer- 

 tain definite matters. The study of his reaction-times, association- 

 times, etc., has been shown to furnish astonishingly definite informa- 

 tion on these specific things. The point made in the present paper is 

 simply that no such case has been made out in the much broader, looser, 

 more varied and more intangible region covered by the question of the 

 trustworthiness of every-day human observation; that the indictment 

 brought against such observation, not so much by the exact letter as by 

 the whole tenor of Professor Miinsterberg's article, is not sustained by 

 his instances; and finally that, so far as regards the discrimination of 

 trustworthy from untrustworthy witnesses (truthfulness aside) as to 

 the affairs of ordinary life, the investigation by expert psychologists, 

 in order to lie entitled to authority, would have to be vastly more com- 

 prehensive and vastly more able than there is any practical possibility 

 of commanding. That there are special classes of cases in which the 

 expert's investigation of a witness would be of value is certain, but the 

 scope of his usefulness must be regarded as severely limited. So far 

 as the ordinary run of tilings is concerned, the present homely pro- 

 cedure, imperfect as it is. is to be preferred to a system in which, over 

 and above the question of the trustworthiness of witnesses, there would 

 he injected into every case of importance the further and at least 

 equally puzzling question of the trustworthiness of the tests employed 

 by the psychological expert. 



