Mental set. Two words that could revolutionise criminal detection
Sunday Standard. July 5, 1981
In what follows, the original newspaper article mentions that it was based on an interview about a report I had written with restrictions to its publication by the Government department which had commissioned it. I no longer have a copy of the report. It focuses on the recently-solved case of what had become known as the Yorkshire Ripper murders. It discusses the nature of mental blinkers or set and proposes ways of reducing its sometimes serious consequences.
Ironically, it also demonstrates in an unintentional way my own crushingly-obvious mental set in hindsight. Throughout ,my language implies my perceptions as treating social actors as male: doctors are male, managers are male, lost toddlers are male, parents, searching for lost toddlers, are male, and so on.
I stand rightly convicted of carrying with me a dominant mental set, the focus of the report, and which influenced my thinking and writing at the time.
The terminology of mental set was overtaken by the term mind-set in the professional and scholarly domains. By the late 1990s, it had been replaced in my work which had become increasingly influenced by my work colleague and life partner Susan Moger. Susan also did a good job reminding me if I strayed into my earlier male-dominated mental assumptions.
The audio is the extended interview published in the Scottish newspaper The Sunday Standard.
