Issues in Interdisciplinarity 2019-20/Power of the Unconscious in Court Trials

Introduction

The idea of the unconscious mind came up at the beginning of the twentieth century with the foundation of psychoanalysis by the scientist Sigmund Freud. He was the first to define it as the ‘reservoir of feelings, thoughts, urges, and memories outside of our conscious awareness’. He pointed out that this obscure part of the mind could justify, explain and dictate most of human behaviours stating that ‘the ego is not master in its own house’. Since then, many studies focused on the influence of the unconscious mind in decisions making. It is important to highlight that the decision making process being ‘the basic cognitive processes of human behaviors by which a preferred option or a course of actions is chosen from among a set of alternatives based on certain criteria’, is surely made unconsciously. Different criteria are taken into account by our brain in the complex process of decision making. These range from past experiences to the actual context of the situation, hence making decision-making a biased procedure. The aim of this wikibook is to explore the power and the influences of the unconscious mind within the judicial system centering our work around these questions : Are trial judgements fair ? Could we affirm that judgements are unconsciously biased ?