Pathology of Lying, Accusation, and Swindling: A Study in Forensic PsychologyHealy, William
Science
Pathology of Lying, Accusation, and Swindling: A Study in Forensic Psychology
Healy, William
Criminal psychology; Swindlers and swindling
In the mental examination we found much of interest. When first
seen he gave every appearance of being a mental defective, but by
judicious stimulation he could be waked up to do comparatively
good work in several directions. On the Binet tests, 1911
series, he passed all but one of the 12 year set; in that he
followed the suggestion offered. On the 15 year old tests he did
three out of five. The failures were on the memory span of
figures and in the repetition of a sentence of 26 syllables.
By our other tests we also found him defective in verbal memory
processes, even when he read the passage to be remembered. In
working with our so-called construction tests, where his success
depended not only upon planning with concrete material, but even
more on the ability to profit by his failures, he did decidedly
poorly. In handling the puzzle box, where above everything is
required perception of the relationship of one step to another,
he succeeded very rapidly. With the cross-line tests, which
require mental representation of an easily remembered figure and
analysis of its parts, he did very poorly, succeeding only after
the third attempt in each of the two simple tests. This is a
type of work that is especially easy for the normal person.
In our ``Aussage'' or Testimony Test we got a decidedly poor
result. At first enumeration he gave only 8 items, and on cross
questioning gave only 6 more. He denied seeing other objects
plain in the picture, but contradicted himself somewhat on this.
It is interesting that he took only one out of four suggestions,
notwithstanding his suggestibility on the Binet test.
On school work he does altogether much better. He writes a good
hand, reads fairly well, and promptly does a sum in long
division. He claims to have reached the 6th grade. One
difficulty in testing him was his prevailing lethargy. We
constantly had to fight this by encouragement. Once he insisted
he must give up the work because he had not had a smoke for an
hour or so. Altogether, including his irregularities, we could
not call him lower than poor in ability, possibly subnormal. He
did not come within the limits of the feebleminded group. Just
where to place him would depend upon what he perhaps could do
under other more favorable conditions. So much for the tests of
ability.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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