surely been gained by another method. The same sensitiveness which
makes Beulah able to receive signs which others do not notice,
evidently makes her able to catch words spoken in a low voice within a
certain distance, while she is not consciously giving her attention to
them. She picks up bits of conversation which she overhears and which
settle in her subconscious mind, until they later come to her
consciousness in a way for which she cannot account. All were startled
when at the end of our first day together I took a bill in my closed
hand and asked her what I had there, and she at once replied a
"ten-dollar bill," while they all agreed that the child had never seen
a ten-dollar bill before. This result surprised the minister and the
judge greatly, and only later did I remember that I had whispered to
the judge in the next room, with the door open, that I should ask her
to tell the figures on a ten-dollar bill. In the same way the greatest
sensation must be explained, which the experiments before my arrival
yielded. The New York lady who came with the minister's family and
others to the house was overwhelmed when Beulah spelled her name,
which, as the affidavit said, was not known to any one else present.
This affidavit was as a matter of course given according to the best
knowledge of all concerned. Yet when later I came to Warren, one of
the participants who told me the incident strengthened it by adding
that he was the more surprised when the child spelled the name
correctly with a K at the end, as he had understood that it was
spelled with a T. In other words, some of those present did know the
name, and the lady had evidently either been introduced or addressed
by some one, and this had slipped from their minds because Beulah was
not in the room. But she was probably in the other room and caught it
in her subconscious mind. At her first début before the minister, too,
by her same abnormal sensitiveness she probably heard when he told the
mother that he had a glass of honey in his pocket. In short, the two
actions of her subconscious mind, or of her brain, always go together,
her noticing of family signs from her mother and sister and her
catching of spoken words from strangers, both under conditions under
which ordinary persons would neither see nor hear them. We have
therefore nothing mysterious, nothing supernatural before us, but an
extremely interesting case of an abnormal mental development, and this
unusual power working in a mind which is entirely naïve and sincere.
How long will this naïveté and sincerity last? This is no
psychological, but a social problem. Since the newspapers have taken
hold of the case, every mail brings heaps of letters from all corners
of the country. Some of them bring invitations to give performances,
but they are not the most dangerous ones. Most of the letters urge the
child to use her mysterious, supernatural powers for trivial or
pathetic ends in the interest of the writers. Sometimes she is to
locate a lost trunk, or a mislaid pocketbook; sometimes she is to
prophesy whether a voyage will go smoothly or whether a business
venture will succeed; sometimes she is to read in her mind where a
runaway child may be found; and almost always money promises are
connected with such requests. The mother, who has not much education
but who is a splendid, right-minded country woman with the very best
intentions for the true good of her children, has ignored all this
silly invasion. She showed me a whole teacupful of two-cent stamps for
replies which she had collected from Beulah's correspondence. But I
ask again, how long will it last? If Beulah closes her eyes and some
chance letters come to her mind, and she forms a word from them and
sends it as a reply to the anxious mother who is seeking her child,
she will soon discover that it is easy to gather money in a world
which wants to be deceived. She is followed by the most tempting
invitations to live in metropolitan houses where sensational
experiments can be performed with her. The naïve mother is still
impressed when a New York woman applies the well-known tricks and
assures her that the child reminds her so much of her own little dead
niece that she ought to come to her New York house. It is a pity how
the community forces sensationalism, commercialism, and finally humbug
and fraud on a naïve little country girl who ought to be left alone
with her pet lamb in her mother's kitchen. Her gift is extremely
interesting to the psychologist, and if it is not misused by those who
try to pump spiritualistic superstitions into her little mind or to
force automatic writing on her it will be harmless and no cause for
hysteric developments. But surely her art is entirely useless for any
practical purpose. She cannot know anything which others do not know
beforehand. Clairvoyant powers or prophetic gifts are not hers, and
above all her mind-reading is a natural process. The edifice of
science will not be shaken by the powers of my little Rhode Island
friend.
Yet the most important part is not the fate of the individual child,
but the behaviour of this nation-wide public which chases her into the
swamps of fraud. No one can decide and settle whether the party of
superstition forms the majority or the minority. If all the silent
voters were sincere, they probably would carry the vote for telepathy.
But in any case, such a party exists, and it does not care in the
least that scientific investigations clear up a case which threatens
to bring our world of thought into chaotic disorder. A world of mental
trickery and mystery, a world which by its very principle could never
be understood, is to them instinctively more welcome than a world of
scientific order. There cannot be a more fundamental contrast between
men who are to form a social unit than this radical difference of
attitude toward the world of experience. Compared with this deepest
split in the community, all its other social questions seem temporary
and superficial.
V
THE MIND OF THE JURYMAN
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. Who does not recall sensational acquittals in which
sympathy for the defendant or prejudice against the plaintiff carried
away the feelings of the twelve good men and true? For them are the
unwritten laws, for them the mingling of justice with race hatreds or
with gallantry. And even in the heart of New York a judge recently
said to a chauffeur who had killed a child and had been acquitted:
"Now go and get drunk again; then this jury will allow you to run over
as many children as you like."
Yet whatever the temperament of the jury and its legal insight, we may
sharply separate its ideas of deserved punishment from that far more
important aspect of its function, the weighing of evidence. The
juries may be whimsical in their decisions, they may be lenient in
their acquittals or over-rigid in their verdicts of guilty, but that
is quite in keeping with the democratic spirit of the institution. The
Teutonic nations did not want the abstract law of the scholarly
judges; they want the pulse-beat of life throbbing in the court
decisions, and what may be a wilful ignoring of the law of the jurists
may be a heartfelt expression of the popular sentiment. Better to have
some statutes riddled by the illogical verdicts than legal decisions
severed from the sense of justice which is living in the soul of the
nation. But while a rush into prejudice or a hasty overriding of law
may draw attention to some exceptional verdicts, in the overwhelming
mass of jury decisions nothing is aimed at but a real clearing up of
the facts. The evidence is submitted, and while the lawyers may have
wrangled as to what is evidence and what is not, and while they may
have tried, by their presentation of the witnesses on their own side
and by their cross-examinations, to throw light on some parts of the
evidence and shadow on some others, the jurymen are simply to seek the
truth when all the evidence has been submitted. 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.
It cannot be denied that much criticism has been directed against the
whole jury system in America as well as in 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 feels from the start exactly like all the others, the
coöperation of the twelve men cannot do any harm, but it cannot do any
particular good either. Such cases do not demand the special interest
of the social reformer. 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 this kind of
arguing has been given up for a long while. The famous French lawyer
who, whenever he had a weak case, made use of his right to challenge
jurymen by systematically excluding all persons of higher education,
certainly blundered in this respect, according to the views of to-day.
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 its final verdict has an
equal chance to hit the truth.
But the critics say that it is not the lack of general or logical
training of the single individual 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. 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, but whether
the outcome be wretched or splendid, in any case it is the product of
persons who have been entirely changed. In the midst of the panic or
in the midst of the heroic enthusiasm no one has kept his own
characteristic mental features. The individual no longer judges for
himself; he is carried away, his own heart reverberates with the
feelings of the whole crowd. The mass consciousness is not an adding
up, a mere summation, of the individual minds, but the creation of
something entirely new. Such a crowd may be pushed into any paths,
chance leaders may use or misuse its increased suggestibility for any
ends. No one can foresee whether this heaping up of men will bring
good or bad results. Certainly the individual level of the crowd will
always be below the level of its best members. And is not a jury
necessarily such a group with a mass consciousness of its own? Every
individual is melted into the total, has lost his independent power
of judging, and becomes influenced through his heightened
suggestibility and social feeling by any chance pressure which may
push toward error as often as toward truth.
But if such arguments are brought into play, it is evident that it is
no longer a legal question, but a psychological one. 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 standpoint of the scientist.
This means he is not simply to form an opinion from general vague
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. 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. But his aim is not simply to imitate or to repeat the social
scenes of the community. He must simplify them and bring them down to
the most elementary situations, in which only the characteristic
mental actions are left. Is this not the way in which the
experimenters proceed in every field? 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. 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 the 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. He does not carry them on in the turmoil of social
life, but prepares artificial situations in which the persons will
show the laws of mental behaviour. 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 behaviour and life attitudes of the man for years.
Everything depends upon the degree with which the characteristic
mental states are brought into play under experimental conditions. The
great advantage of the experimental method is, here as everywhere,
that everything can be varied and changed at will and that the
conditions and the effects can be exactly measured.
If we apply these principles to the question of the jury, the task is
clear. We want to find out whether the coöperation, the discussion,
and the repeated voting of a number of individuals are helping or
hindering them in the effort to judge correctly upon a complex
situation. 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 which 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. Secondly, the situation must be
difficult in order that a real doubt may prevail. If all the voters
were on one side from the start, no discussion would be needed.
Thirdly, it must be a rather complex situation in order that the
judgment may be influenced by a number of motives. Only in this case
will it be possible for the discussion to point out factors which the
other party may have overlooked, thus giving a chance for changes of
mind. All these demands must be fulfilled if the experiment is really
to picture the jury function. But it would be utterly superfluous and
would make the exact measurement impossible if the material on which
the judgment is to be based were of the same kind of which the
evidence in the courtroom is composed. The trial by jury in an actual
criminal case may involve many picturesque and interesting details,
but the mental act of judging is no different when the most trivial
objects are chosen.
I settled on the following simple device: I used sheets of dark gray
cardboard. On each were pasted white paper dots of different form and
in an irregular order. Each card had between ninety-two and a hundred
and eight such white dots of different sizes. The task was to compare
the number of spots on one card with the number of spots on another.
Perhaps I held up a card with a hundred and four dots above, and below
one with ninety-eight. Then the subjects of the experiment had to
decide whether the upper card had more dots or fewer dots or an equal
number compared with the lower one. I made the first set of
experiments with eighteen Harvard students. I took more than the
twelve men who form a jury in order to reënforce the possible effect,
but did not wish to exceed the number greatly, so that the character
of the discussion might be similar to that in a jury. A much larger
number would have made the discussion too formal or too unruly. The
eighteen men sat around a long table and were first allowed to look
for half a minute at the two big cards, each forming his judgment
independently. Then at a signal every one had to write down whether
the number of dots on the upper card was larger, equal, or smaller.
Immediately after that they had to indicate by a show of hands how
many had voted for each of the three possibilities. After that a
discussion began. Indeed, the two cards offered plenty of points for
earnest and vivid discussion. During the exchange of opinion in which
those who had voted larger tried to convince the party of the smaller,
and vice versa, they were always able to look at the cards and to
refer to them, pointing to the various parts. One showed how the
distances on the one card appeared larger, and another pointed out how
the spots were clustered in a certain region, a third how the dots
were smaller in some parts, a fourth spoke about the optical
illusions, a fifth about certain impressions resulting from the
narrowness of the margin, and a sixth about the effect of certain
irregularities in the distribution. In short, very different aspects
were considered and very different factors emphasized. The discussion
was sometimes quite excited, three or four men speaking at the same
time. After exactly five minutes of talking the vote was repeated,
again at first being written and then being taken by show of hands. A
second five minutes' exchange of opinion followed with a new effort to
convince the dissenters. After this period the third and last vote was
taken. This experiment was carried out with a variety of cards with
smaller or larger difference of numbers, but the difference always
enough to allow an uncertainty of judgment. Here, indeed, we had
repeated all the essential conditions of the jury vote and discussion,
and the mental state was characteristically similar to that of the
jurymen.
The very full accounts which the participants in the experiment wrote
down the following day indicated clearly that we had a true imitation
of the mental process in spite of the striking simplicity of our
conditions. One man, for instance, described his inner experience as
follows: "I think the experiment involves factors quite comparable to
those that determine the verdict of a jury. The cards with their
spots are the evidence pro and con which each juryman has before him
to interpret. Each person's decision on the number is his
interpretation of the situation. The arguments, too, seem quite
comparable to the arguments of the jury. Both consist in pointing out
factors of the situation that have been overlooked and in showing how
different interpretations may be possible." Another man writes: "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 immediate
attention to other criterions than those he used in his first
judgment, and these often outweighed the original. Similarly,
different jurymen would base their opinion on different aspects of the
case, and discussion would tend to draw their attention to other
aspects. The experiment also illustrated the relative weight given to
the opinion of different fellow-jurymen. I found that the statements
of a few of the older men who have had more extensive psychological
experience weighed more with me than those of the others. Suggestion
did not seem to be much of a factor. A man is rather on his mettle,
and ready to defend his original impression, until he finds that it is
hopeless." Again, another writes: "To me the experiment seemed fairly
comparable to the real situation. As in an actual trial, the full
truth was not available, but certain evidence was presented to all for
interpretation. As to the nature of the discussion itself, I think
there was the same mingling of suggestion and real argument that is to
be found in a jury discussion." Another says: "The discussion
influenced me by suggesting other methods of analysis. For instance,
comparison of the amount of open space in two cards, comparison of the
number of dots along the edges, estimation in diagonal lines, were
methods mentioned in the discussion which I used in forming my own
judgments. It does not seem to me that in my own case direct
suggestion had any appreciable effect. I was conscious of a tendency
toward contrasuggestibility. There was a half submerged feeling that
it would be good sport to stick it out for the losing side. The lack
of any unusual amount of suggestion and the presence of the influences
of analysis and detailed comparison seem to me to show that the tests
were in fact fairly comparable to situations in a jury room." To be
sure, there were a few who were strongly impressed by the evident
differences between the rich material of an actual trial and the
meagre content of our tests: there the actions of living men, here the
space relations of little spots. But they evidently did not
sufficiently realize that the forming of such number judgments was not
at all a question of mere perception; that on the contrary many
considerations were involved; most men felt the similarity from the
start.
What were the results of this first group of experiments? Our interest
must evidently be centred on the question of how many judgments were
correct at the first vote before any discussion and any show of hands
were influencing the minds of the men, and how many were correct at
the last vote after the two periods of discussion and after taking
cognizance of the two preceding votes. If I sum up all the results,
the outcome is that 52 per cent. of the first votes were correct and
78 per cent. of the final votes were correct. The discussion of the
successive votes had therefore led to an improvement of 26 per cent.
of all votes. Or, as the correct votes were at first 52 per cent.,
their number is increased by one half. May we not say that this
demonstrates in exact figures that the confidence in the jury system
is justified? And may it not be added that, in view of the widespread
prejudices, the result is almost surprising? Here we had men of high
intelligence who were completely able to take account of every
possible aspect of the situation. They had time to do so, they had
training to do so, and every foregoing experiment ought to have
stimulated them to do so in the following ones. Yet their judgment was
right in only 52 per cent. of the cases until they heard the opinions
of the others and saw how they voted. The mere seeing of the vote,
however, cannot have been decisive, because 48 per cent., that is,
practically half of the votes, were at first incorrect. The wrong
votes might have had as much suggestive influence on those who voted
rightly as the right votes on those on the wrong side. If,
nevertheless, the change was so strongly in the right direction, the
result must clearly have come from the discussion.