ABSTRACTS OF LECTURES ON THE PSYCHOLOGY
OF TESTIMONY AND ON THE STUDY
OF INDIVIDUALITY[1]
By Professor William Stern
First Lecture
The Psychology of Testimony
1. Introduction. Applied Psychology in General. Along side of the purely theoretical psychology, which seeks a knowledge of the elements and laws of the mental life, there is now springing up, as an independent science, an "Applied Psychology." Its purpose is to gather such psychological information as will serve other sciences and especially the practical cultural activities of Education, Law and Medicine. In each of these fields Applied Psychology has a double task: As "Psychognostics" it must provide a scientific basis for practical .knowledge of, and judgments upon, human mental acts and qualities; and as "Psychotechnology" it must give assistance in the practical manipulation of human minds.
An uncritical overestimation of this new science (psychologism) is as unreasonable as its underestimation.
A cardinal error, committed especially in the earlier days of this new science, was the attempt to carry over into it unchanged the methods of pure psychology; the thought was to apply the customary laboratory experiments (which, of intention, bring into artificial isolation the elementary psychical functions and are therefore remote from daily experiences) unaltered in the schools and in the courts, whereas the altered setting of the problem requires of course altered methods. Practical life does not deal with elements, but with very complex mental processes; the special methods of applied psychology must therefore take a middle position; they must combine the necessary nearness to life with that degree of exactness which is indispensable for the drawing of reliable inferences.
The Psychology of Testimony offers an illustration of these methodological points of view.
- ↑ Lectures delivered at the Celebration of the Twentieth Anniversary of the opening of Clark University, Sept., 1909; abstracts prepared in German by Professor Stern, and translated by E. C. Sanford.
