Criminal Psychology by Hans Gross (best book club books for discussion TXT) 📖

“come in,” “go on,” “hurry up,” “look out,” etc. If such words get into the text at all it is difficult to puzzle out how they got in. How easily and frequently people misunderstand is shown by the oath they take. Hardly a day passes on which at least one witness does not say some absolute nonsense while repeating it.

The discovery of such errors and the substitution of what is correct brings us back to the old rule that the mere study of our own cases can not teach us anything, since the field of view is too narrow, the material too uniform, and the stimulation too light. Other disciplines must be studied and examples from the daily life must be sought. Goethe, in particular, can teach us here. In his little monograph, “Hör-, Schreib-and Druckfehler,” he first tells that he had discovered the most curious mistakes in hearing when he reread dictated letters, mistakes which would have caused great difficulty if not immediately looked after. The only means for the solution of these errors is, he says, “to read the matter aloud, get thoroughly into its meaning and repeat the unintelligible word so long that the right one occurs in the flow of speech. Nobody hears all that he knows, nobody is conscious of all that he senses, is able to imagine, or to think. Persons who have never been to school tend to turn into German all Latin and Greek expressions. The same thing happens just as much with words from foreign languages whose pronunciation is unknown to the writer ... and in dictation it occurs that a hearer sets his inner inclination, passion, and need in the place of the word he has heard, and substitutes for it the name of some loved person, or some much desired good morsel.” A better device for the detection of errors than that suggested by Goethe cannot be found, but the protocol or whatever else it may be must be read; otherwise nothing helps. Many mistakes are due, as Münsterberg points out, to the fact that the word is seen for just an instant, and it is easy to misread a word so seen if some similar word had been heard or seen just before. The most senseless corruptions of text occur often, and it seems extraordinary how they may be overlooked. Andresen points out that the reason for all popular explanations is the consciousness of language which struggles against allowing any name to be an empty sound, and still more, strives to give each term a separate meaning and an indubitable intelligibility. The human mind acts here instinctively and naïvely without any reflection, and is determined by feeling or accident. Then it makes all kinds of transformations of foreign words.

This fits with the analogous observation that a group of Catholic patron saints depend for their character on their names. Santa Clara makes clear vision; St. Lucy sounds like lucida, and is the saint of the blind; St. Mamertus is analogous to mamma, the feminine breast, and is the patron saint of nurses and nursing women. Instructive substitutions are Jack Spear, for Shakespeare, Apolda for Apollo; Great victory at le Mans, for Great victory at Lehmanns; “plaster depot,” for “place de Repos.”

Andresen warns us against going too far in analysis. Exaggerations are easy, particularly when we want to get at the source of a misunderstanding because of the illegibility of the style. Our task consists, first of all, in getting at the correctness of what has been said or written, otherwise we have nothing whatever to go by. Only when that is quite impossible may we assume misunderstandings and seek them out. The procedure then must be necessarily linguistic and psychological and requires the consultation of experts in both fields. Certain instructive misunderstandings of the most obvious sort occur when the half-educated drop their dialect, or thoroughly educated people alter the dialectical expressions and try to translate them into high German.

It is frequently important to understand the curious transposition in meaning which foreign words get, e.g., commode, fidel, and famos. A commode gentleman means in German, a pliable person; and a fidel lad is not a loyal soul, but a merry, pleasure-seeking one; famos—originally “famous,”—means expensive or pleasant.

It may be not unimportant to understand how names are altered. Thus, I know a man who curiously enough was called Kammerdiener, whose father was an immigrant Italian called Comadina, and I know two old men, brothers, who lived in different parts of the country, one of whom was called Joseph Waldhauser, the other Leopold Balthasar. In the course of the generation the name had so completely changed that it is impossible to say which is correct. Again, a family bearing the name Theobald is of French origin and used really to be called Du Val. In Steiermark, which had been over-run with Turks two hundred years ago, there are many family names of Turkish origin. Thus Hasenöhrl may come from Hassan Öri; Salata from Saladin; Mullenbock, from Mullei Beg; Sullman from Soliman.

Section 107. (2) Other Misunderstandings.

The quantitative method of modern psychophysics may lead to an exact experimental determination of such false conceptions and misunderstandings as those indicated above, but it is still too young to have any practical value. It is vitiated by the fact that it requires artificial conditions and that the results have reference to artificial conditions. Wundt has tried to simplify apparatus, and to bring experiment into connection with real life. But there is still a far cry from the psychological laboratory to the business of life. With regard to misunderstandings the case is certainly so. Most occur when we do not hear distinctly what another person is saying and supplement it with our own notions. Here the misunderstanding is in no sense linguistic, for words do not receive a false meaning. The misunderstanding lies in the failure to comprehend the sense of what we have heard, and the substitution of incorrect interpretations. Sometimes we may quite understand an orator without having heard every word by simply adding these interpretations, but the correctness of the additions is always questionable, and not only nature and training, but momentary conditions and personal attitude, make a considerable difference. The worst thing about the matter is the fact that nobody is likely to be aware that he has made any interpretations. Yet we do so not only in listening, but in looking. I see on a roof in the distance four white balls about the nature of which I am uncertain. While looking, I observe that one of the balls stretches out head and tail, flaps its wings, etc., and I immediately think, “Oh, those are four pigeons.” Now it may be true that they are four pigeons, but what justification had I for such an interpretation and generalization from the action of one pigeon? In this instance, no doubt, it would have been difficult for me to make a mistake, but there are many cases which are not so obvious and where the interpretation is nevertheless made, and then the misunderstanding is ready to hand. Once my wife and I saw from our seats in the car a chimney-sweep who stood in a railroad station. As he bent over, looking for a lost coin, my very myopic wife cried out, “Look at the beautiful Newfoundland dog.” Now this is a conceivable illusion for a short-sighted individual, but on what basis could my good lady interpret what she saw into the judgment that it was a Newfoundland dog, and a beautiful one at that? Taine illustrates a similar process with the story of a child who asked why his mother had put on a white dress. He was told that his mother was going to a party and had to put on her holiday clothes for that purpose. After that, whenever the child saw anybody in holiday attire, green or red or any other color, it cried out,—“Oh, you have a white dress on!” We adults do exactly the same thing. As Meinong says so well, we confuse identity with agreement. This proposition would save us from a great many mistakes and misunderstandings if kept in mind.

How frequently and hastily we build things out is shown by a simple but psychologically important game. Ask anybody at hand how the four and the six look on his watch, and let him draw it. Everybody calmly draws, IV and VI, but if you look at your watch you will find that the four looks so, IIII, and that there is no six. This raises the involuntary question, “Now what do we see when we look at the watch if we do not see the figures?” and the further question, “Do we make such beautiful mistakes with all things?”

I assert that only that has been reliably seen which has been drawn. My father asked my drawing teacher to teach me not to draw but to observe. And my teacher, instead of giving me copies, followed the instruction by giving me first one domino, then two, then three, one upon the other, then a match box, a book, a candlestick, etc. And even today, I know accurately only those objects in the household which I had drawn. Yet frequently we demand of our witnesses minutely accurate descriptions of things they had seen only once, and hastily at that.

And even if the thing has been seen frequently, local and temporal problems may make great difficulties. With regard to the first class of problems, Exner[331] cites the example of his journey from Gmunden to Vienna in which, because of a sharp curve in the road, he saw everything at Lambach reversed, although the whole stretch of road was familiar to him. The railroad trains, the public buildings, the rivers, all the notable places seemed to lie on the wrong side. This is particularly characteristic if a city is entered, especially at night, through a railroad terminal, and the locomotive is attached to the rear of the train. In the daily life the alteration of objects by locations is familiar. How different a landscape seems at night or in winter, although it has been observed hundreds of times during the day or in summer. It is good to look around frequently on the road, particularly at cross-roads, if the way back is to be kept in mind. Even the starting point may have a disturbing effect on the sense of place. For example, if you have traveled numerous times on the train from A to B, and for once you start your journey from C, which is beyond A, the familiar stretch from A to B looks quite different and may even become unrecognizable. The estimation of time may exercise considerable influence on such and similar local effects. Under most circumstances we tend, as is known, to reduce subjectively great time-spans, and hence, when more time than customary is required by an event, this becomes subjectively smaller, not only for the whole event but also for each of its parts. In this way what formerly seemed to extend through an apparently long period seems now to be compressed into a shorter one. Then everything appears too soon and adds to the foreign aspect of the matter.

The case is similar for time-differences. Uphues[332] cites an example: “If a person has not heard a bell or anything else for some time and then hears it again, the question whether the object existed in the interval does not arise. It is recognized again and that is enough.” Certainly it is enough for us, but whether the thing is true, whether really the same phenomena or only similar ones have been noted, is another question rarely asked. If the man or the bell is the same that we now perceive anew, the inference is involuntarily drawn that they must have persisted, but