Study Of Criminal Magistrates' Mode Of Thinking

Criminal judgment is a juristic issue, while the course of judgment is a psychological process. Accordingly criminal judgment involves psychology and law, which is the appropriate topic of forensic psychology. This dissertation is just from angles of law and psychology to explore the above issue. As viewed from psychology, the thinking mode of criminal judgment is only the judge's mental process channel to dispose criminal cases. Facts and laws are input through the entry, and mentally processed through the channel, finally judgments are output. Thereby, the key to the research on criminal judgment is to study the "processing channel" and whether "facts" and "regulations" can be kept unaltered in this channel.In the prospect of law, a judge's task is to make judgments, guarantee its justness and predictability (objectivity). To a psychologist, the process of making judgments is none other than the process for a judge to find the answer to a case. Such a process is like the process in scientific research to raise a hypothesis. Since a hypothesis can only come into existence after being tested in scientific research, the way to guarantee the best answer to the case is test. According to modern psychology, the process of test can lead the judge to the tentative search for juristic conclusion and it is through the feedback test that a judge can fix on the best and objective conclusion. Generally, the appropriateness of a judgment can only be fulfilled through special juristic reasoning which is not equal to the test mentioned in the above. Therefore, "finding" appears first in the practical criminal judgment, and then it is "tested". Finally, the result of "test" is "reasoned". Namely, there exist three corresponding psychological mechanisms in judge's judgment, and its objectivity and appropriateness: finding, testing and reasoning. Realistic jurisconsults, such as Frank, see finding and testing as two elements of problem solving. Since this dissertation is based on the previous researches, finding and testing here are called as problem solving too.If it is admitted that there mainly exist three psychological mechanisms: finding, testing and reasoning, in the channel of thinking process, then finding and testing are foundationally meaningful compared with reasoning. Or, problem solving compared with juristic reasoning is more foundational. According to Lonegan's problem solving theory, psychological operation in problem solving is much more complicated than reasoning. Moreover, most of the steps of reorganizing the reasoning need to...