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Last updated
2005.07.17.

Professor David Canter, Centre for Investigative Psychology, The University of Liverpool
"In the Kingdom of the Blind"

The 15th Century philosopher Erasmus claimed that "In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." His argument was that if all else around you were ignorant than even a little knowledge would make you significant in that community. But in a witty and perceptive short-story the late 19th century novelist H.G. Wells shows how in a kingdom entirely peopled by blind people that the one-eyed person is an aberration more likely to be regarded as mad than appropriate for high office.

This paradox is directly relevant to the broadening horizons of psychology and law. It is productive to suggest that the Law is often a kingdom of people who are blind to many insights that psychologists have. Psychologists for their part often do not appreciate that they are only partially sighted and that there are other ways of exploring reality than theirs. Furthermore, if psychologists are not aware of these problems and take them into when they interact with legal processes they will be regarded as less then capable. Their very insights will be what marks them off from lawyers, probation officers, detectives and all the other people who have daily commerce with crime and criminals.

The central problem is that those involved in dealing with criminals, or other aspects of the legal process, have to be concerned with individuals and definitive answers about the person they are dealing with. Yet despite more than a century of psychological therapies and other areas of professional practice in which the services are set up to deal with unique people, psychology as a science and profession is still fundamentally nomothetic, focussed on trends and patterns across sub-groups not on descriptions of actual persons. Those involved in the law see only the trees, like people with limited vision. Psychologists are aware of a wood, only able to recognise individual trees from knowledge of where they are in the wood.

The tension created by these two differing visions of the problem are for lawyers, police officers, prison governors and others either to dismiss psychology because it cannot see what is the focus of their attention, or to squeeze definitive statements out of psychologists that are not supported by their science. Psychologists for their part can have the clarity of their vision reduced by seeking to respond to these demands when they do no have the capacity to do so. Their one-eyed viewpoint also often gives them a two dimensional image of the topics they are considering.

Examples the reciprocal distortions provided this interplay of the partially sighted and the blind are everywhere to be seen. The quest to predict how dangerous a person will be in the future; proposals of courses of treatment or methods of managing offenders; the preparation of ‘profiles’ for police investigations; systems for determining deception; explanations of criminality, and many other areas of forensic psychology attempt to build general models that will be relevant for large sub-groups of people and then to derive decisions about individuals from these models. These attempts are usually much less successful than most of us would like to believe.

To increase our success in communicating with people who see the world in different ways from psychologists, it is necessary to find the common ground that both share in their perceptions. One aspect of this is a much clearer focus and understanding of individual differences. A second realised by a growing number of people, is to see this common ground being in the sharing of narratives.

Actual cases will be drawn upon to illustrate how psychologists can offer alternative stories to those being considered by those involved in the legal process. These stories need to be grounded in the appropriate research, but that research needs to be translated from into the Braille that the legal profession can read.