The Accuracy of ‘Reproduced’ Conversation

In any witness's account from memory of a heard conversation, important factors are his motives and his mental apparatus of recall and reproduction. Since rendering the gist of a conversation involves editing by omission, all the factors in Freud's ‘dream‐work’ may have combined to distort the account given in a court of law, especially by a witness who extensively uses ‘direct oration’. The numerous experiments on the reliability of testimony for seen events contrast with the few in which heard events have been the material. Is auditory imagery as reliable as visual? A social psychologist's view is given of the treatment of conversation by historians, biographers and novelists. The possibility that a strict training in scientific psychological method may impede the writing of an imaginative story, and the use of tape‐recorders are discussed, along with the ethical and legal issues arising from the use of tape‐recordings as evidence

Cognition · Cognitive psychology · Conversation · Dream · Mental image · Psychotherapist · Recall · Suggestibility · Witness · Communication · Law · Law in Society and Culture · Psychology · Rhetoric and Communication Studies · Social Psychology

• Some Early Relations Between English Ethnologists and Psychologists

  T H Pear•The Journal of the Royal…•1960

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