In times of stress, people may turn to the supernatural rather than to physical reality in attempts to solve various problems. This is occasionally true in the criminal justice system, especially when normal investigative processes have proven unsuccessful. There have, of course, been criminal cases in which “psychic” predictions have proven correct, or at least close enough to be relatively believable, but in other cases, the predictions of avowed psychics have simply proven to be wrong.

Do premonitions in the criminal justice system arise from unknown supernatural influences? Or are there more prosaic psychological sources of premonitions that would more readily account for the observed psychic failure rates?

As human beings, we tend to assume that our mental processes are rational and available to our conscious awareness. However, this is often not the case.

Maier (1931) conducted experiments on mental sets, essentially the habits of mind, with which people confront problem-solving. One of his problems, the “two-cord” problem, required the tying of two cords (strings) together, each suspended from the ceiling and too far apart to reach by hand. One obvious solution was to tie some sort of weight to one of the strings, turning it into a pendulum. You could swing it away, catch it on the back swing, and tie it to the other string.

The problem was that lots of people couldn’t figure this out.

So, in some of Maier’s experiments, an experimenter would “accidentally” brush against one of the strings and set it swinging so that people would get the idea. When the experimenters did this, many........

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