The observer as reporter: A survey of the 'psychology of testimony'.

To the individual who, in psychological experimentation, submits himself to a given experience and renders us an account of it, we apply the name observer.The observer's account will commonly assume linguistic form.Although language is in the main a flexible, delicate, accurate, and easy means of communicating ideas, yet the observer's account can never do justice to the continuity, complexity, and delicacy of shading of his mental experience, however much we refine our terminology and train our observer.And all too often we fail to realize the inadequacy of verbal expression to the experience which is being described.We fail to keep in mind that the observer not only observes, but that he also reports, and that it is not only possible, but practically certain, that the report is only a partial and often a misleading statement of the real experience.If, then, the work of reporting is difficult even for the trained expert working under laboratory conditions and using a carefully refined terminology, how much more difficult must it be for the untrained individual to report with accuracy and completeness the experiences of his daily life, when to the inadequacy of his language there must be added the falsifying influences of misdirected attention, mal-observation, and errors of memory, not to mention the falsifying influences that may spring from lack of caution, of zeal for accurate statement, or even from deliberate intent to mislead.The idea that the capacity for report should itself be a subject for 1 This paper was presented in condensed form before