48 
INACCURACY IN TESTIMONY. 
Causes of inaccuracy .—When a man is willing to tell the • 
truth, untrue statements may result from the following 
causes: 
(a) Poor observation. A man may see only part of a 
total action and have a very inadequate or mistaken 
notion of the whole; a man sometimes sees what he expects 
to see; people often hear imperfectly or mistakenly. 
(b) Poor comprehension and reasoning. Inference is a 
part of every mental operation. When we see a clock face, 
we take it for granted that a clock is behind it, but this 
is not necessarily true; a tenderfoot thinks mountains are 
much nearer than they are, because he infers the distance 
which the given appearance implies in low country; 
illiterate people distort long sentences, and piece out by 
inference to a twisted meaning. 
(c) Poor memory. This is very common. Beware of a 
person who claims to remember everything; his testimony 
is usually open to suspicion. Memory can be helped by 
talking of the event in question, often as to unimportant 
incidents, or of a man’s occupation connected with the 
thing to be remembered. But give him time; do not 
hurry. Do not press an emotional witness too far; there 
is real danger, especially with such a person, that you 
may make him remember what he never saw or heard or 
knew, except through your forcible suggestion. 
(d) Influence of other people’s statements. Untrained 
persons who have seen or heard part of an exciting incident 
unconsciously try to complete the matter by fitting what 
they have seen or what they know to details told by 
others. They may even end, without untruthful intent, 
by weaving the whole garbled mess into their own story 
as to what they saw and heard and know. 
(e) Strong feeling. Excitement and fear often lead to 
exaggeration in which important details are sometimes 
overlooked. 
(/) Temperament, age, occupation. A ranger looking at 
a bunch of cattle sees also whether the range is over- 
grazed, or grazed in patches because of poor salting or 
