Hugo Münsterberg

“ We know how men in a crowd do indeed lose some of the best features of their individuality. A crowd may be thrown into a panic, may rush into any foolish, violent action, may lynch and plunder, or a crowd may be stirred to a pitch of enthusiasm, may be roused to heroic deeds or to wonderful generosity ”

“ We must therefore artificially create a situation which brings into action the judgment, the discussion, and the vote; but if we are loyal to the idea of experimenting, we must keep the experiment free from all those features of a real jury deliberation that have nothing to do with the mental action itself. Moreover, it is evident that the situations to be judged must allow a definite knowledge as to the objective truth. The experimenter must know which verdict of his voters corresponds to the real facts. ”

“ And mostly they do not forget that they will live up to their duty best the more they suppress in their own hearts the question whether they like or dislike the truth that comes to light. Whoever weighs the social significance of the jury system ought not to be guided by the few stray cases in which the emotional response obscures the truth, but all praise and blame and every scrutiny of the institution ought to be confined essentially to the ability of the jurymen to live up to their chief responsibility, the sober finding of the true facts. ”

“ Those best informed within and without the legal science agree that the verdicts of straightforward people with public-school education are in the long run, neither better nor worse than those of men with college schooling or professional training. A jury of artisans and farmers understands and looks into a mass of neutral material as well as a jury of bankers and doctors, or at least their final verdict has an equal chance to hit the truth. ”

“ It is true that those who turned from worse to better by seeing the vote of the others were in a slight majority, bringing the total vote five per cent. upward; but this difference is so small that it could just as well be explained by the mere fact that this act of public voting reinforced the attention and improved a little the total vote through this stimulation of the social consciousness. It is not surprising that the mere seeing of the votes in such cases has so small an effect, incomparable with that of a real discussion in which new vistas are opened, inasmuch as in forty per cent. ”

“ EVERY lawyer knows some good stories about some wild juries he has known, which made him shiver and doubt whether a dozen laymen ever can see a legal point. But every newspaper reader, too, remembers an abundance of cases in which the decision of the jury startled him by its absurdity. ”

“ It cannot be denied that much criticism has been directed against the whole jury system in America and Europe by legal scholars, as well as by laymen, on account of the prevailing doubt whether the traditional form is really furthering the clearing-up of the hidden truth. Where the evidence is so perfectly clear that every one by himself alone feels from the start exactly like all the others, the co-operation of the twelve men cannot do any harm ”

“ Hence we have no right to say that one type of mind is better than another. We may say only they differ, and that this difference makes men fit and women unfit for the task which society requires from jurymen. ”

“ The modern student of mental life is accustomed to the methods of the laboratory. He wants to see exact figures, by which the essential facts come into sharp relief. But let us understand clearly what such an experiment means. When the psychologist goes to work in his laboratory, his aim is to study those thoughts and emotions and feelings and deeds which move our social world. ”

“ The physicist or the chemist does not study the great events as they occur in nature on a large scale and with bewildering complexity of conditions, but he brings down every special fact which interests him to a neat, miniature copy on his laboratory table. ”

“ The cobbler has to stick to his last: the psychologist has to be satisfied with analyzing the mental processes, but it is not his concern to mingle in politics. He must leave it to others to decide whether it will really be a gain if the jury-box is filled with persons whose minds are unable to profit from discussion and who return to their first idea, however much is argued from the other side. It is evident that this tendency of the female mind must be advantageous for many social purposes. ”

“ In both cases there was an increase of about five per cent. correct judgments. I also drew from this the conclusion that the show of hands was ineffective as a direct influence toward correctness, and that it had only the slight indirect value of forcing the men to concentrate their attention better on those cards. All results, therefore, point in the same direction: it is really the argument which brings a co-operating group nearer to the truth, and not the seeing how the other men vote. Hence the psychologist has every reason to be satisfied with the jury system. ”

“ But the critics say that it is not the lack of general or logical training of the individual person which obstructs the path of justice. The trouble lies rather in the mutual influence of the twelve men. The more persons work together, the less, they say, every single man can reach his highest level. They become a mass, with mass consciousness, a kind of crowd in which each one becomes oversuggestible. Each one thinks less reliably, less intelligently, and less impartially than he would by himself alone. ”

“ There he mixes a few chemical solutions in his retorts and his test-tubes, or produces the rays or sparks or currents with his subtle laboratory instruments, and he feels sure that whatever he finds there must hold true everywhere in the gigantic universe. If the waters move in a certain way in his little tank on his table, he knows that they must move according to the same laws in the midst of the ocean. In this spirit the psychologist arranges his experiments, too. ”

“ Every individual member is melted into the total, has lost his independent power of judging, and has become influenced through his heightened suggestibility and social feeling by any chance pressure which may push toward error as often as toward truth. ”

“ It may be said that the men had more training in scientific observations, and the task was therefore slightly easier for them than for most of the women. I should say that, all taken together, men and women showed an equal ability in immediate judgment, as with both groups about half of the first judgments were correct. The fact that with the men two per cent. more, with the women five per cent. less, than half were right would not mean much. But the situation is entirely different with the second figure. We saw that for the men the discussion secured an increase from fifty-two per cent. ”

“ The psychologist alone deals scientifically with the problem of mutual mental influence and with the reënforcing or awakening of mental energies by social coöperation. He should accordingly investigate the question with his own methods, and deal with it from the point of view of the scientist. This means he is not simply to form an opinion from general value impressions and to talk about it as about a question of politics, where any man may have his personal idea or fancy, but to discover the facts by definite experiments. ”

“ His doubts and fears come up only when difference of opinion exists, and the discussion and the repeated votes overcome the divergence of opinion. The skeptics claim that the system as such may easily be instrumental for suppressing the truth and bringing the erroneous opinion to victory. In earlier times a frequent objection was that lack of higher education made men unfit to weigh correctly the facts in a complicated situation, but for a long while this kind of arguing has been given up. ”

“ An experiment on memory or attention or imagination or feeling may bring out in a few minutes mental facts which the ordinary observer would discover only if he were to watch the behavior and life attitudes of the man for years. ”

“ In the experiment it seemed that one man judged by one criterion and another by another, such as distribution, size of spots, vacant spaces, or counting along one edge. Discussion often brought a man's attention to other criterions than those he used in his first judgment, and these often outweighed the original. ”

“ The pairs of cards which were exposed when the show of hands was made were the same as those which were shown without any one knowing how the other men judged. We calculated the results on the basis of four hundred reports. They showed that the total number of right judgments in the cases without showing hands was sixty per cent. correct, in those with show of hands about sixty-five per cent. A hundred and twenty men had turned from the right to the wrong ”