Who is the father of forensic psychology?

Who is the father of forensic psychology?

Here is the detail and the brief historical description about the history of forensic psychology because we use the terms forensics in daily routine life so we must aware the father of forensic psychology as for general knowledge and also for further study in psychology and clinical psychology if we have a mind to become a forensic psychologist.

Munsterberg is the father of forensic psychology here is the interesting detail about the science of forensic psychology and Munstergerg. 

Facts About Hugo Munsterberg the Father of Forensic Psychology. All great and interesting sciences and scientific studies have come from equally great and interesting scientific minds and the field of forensic psychology is no exception.

Forensic Psychology dates back to at least the turn of the twentieth century.

William Stern Interesting Discovery on Memory

William Stern studied memory in 1901 by asking students to examine a picture for forty five seconds and then try to recall what was happening in it.

What Happen When the Individual Recall Memory

He would see how much the person could recall at various intervals after seeing the picture. These experiments came before more contemporary research about the reliability of eyewitness’s testimony in court. Stern concluded from his research that recall memories are generally in accurate the more time between seeing the picture and being asked to recall it the more errors were made.

People especially recalled false information when the experimenter gave them a lead in question such as, "Did you see the man with the knife?" The person would answer, "Yes," even if there was no knife present.

Lead in questions is often used in police interrogations and in questioning witnesses.

The First Forensic Psychologist in History of Psychology

Hugo Munsterberg is often called the first forensic psychologist. He wrote a book called On the Witness Stand. It was published in 1908 after the work of William Stern.

Other Psychologist Efforts in Forensic Psychology

Other psychologists before this as Alfred Binet and Sigmund Freud had also constructed tests that could be used in judicial proceeding. They both did studies suggesting that the time it takes for a person to answer a question could be a factor in determining guilt or innocence.

North eastern University Psychology Department Forensic Psychology Information (November, 2002) in 1916, Lewis Terman a Stanford psychologist began to apply psychology to law enforcement. He revised Alfred Binet's intelligence tests and formed the Stanford-Binet intelligence test. These tests we reused to assess the intelligence of thirty applicants for the police and firefighting jobs in San Jose, CA. A few years later L.L.Thurston used the same type of test in Detroit. Now this type of testing is used in most police departments in the country.

The application of psychology in law and law enforcement continued throughout the 1920's and 1930's.

To this day there is still a special interest in extending psychology to police work. The demand for psychologists in the legal system has grown considerably over the past several decades. Currently almost 2,000 psychologists belong to the American Psychology Law Society.