The Truth Machine
Page 14
Criticized by his colleagues for writing what they dismissed as “yellow psychology”—popular psychology written for magazines and newspapers— Münsterberg felt obliged to explain the new science to the general public in mass circulation periodicals.42 The German émigré had eclectic psychological interests, and during 1907 and 1908, he published a number of articles in the popular press on the relationship between psychology and crime.43 His first such piece, “Nothing But the Truth,” discussed the bearing of psychological perception experiments on the reliability of witness testimony.44 The article inspired a New York Times commentary headlined “A Psychologist’s Judicial Warning / Munsterberg Writes of Errors in Observation Due to Personal Equation.”45 “In short,” Münsterberg concluded, “every chapter and sub-chapter of sense psychology may help to clear up the chaos and the confusion which prevail in the observation of witnesses.”46 So divergent were the performances of subjects on simple tasks of visual, aural, and temporal perception, that the truth of perception was essentially a matter of individual differences. Münsterberg wanted experimental psychology to spearhead a social revolution that would bring about efficiency, justice, and progress.
Psychology was considered progressive because it produced an objective and reliable knowledge of human nature, and also because it was humane. Münsterberg’s next article, for McClure’s, titled “The Third Degree”47 argued that the “clean conscience of a modern nation rejects every … brutal scheme in the search of truth”; here the Harvard psychologist was twenty years ahead of his time. Appeals against the brutalities of the third degree—the practice of beating confessions out of suspects—would not become commonplace in the popular press until the late 1920s. But as Münsterberg put it, objections against violent methods of obtaining confessions were not based on “sentimental horror” or “esthetic disgust,” but “the instinctive conviction that the method is ineffective in bringing about the real truth.”48 What was effective were “the methods of measurement of association which experimental psychology [had] developed in recent years.”49 Invoking medical metaphors, Münsterberg predicted that the chronoscope “will become more and more, for the student of crime what the microscope is for the student of disease. It makes visible that which remains otherwise invisible, and shows minute facts which allow a clear diagnosis. The physician needs his magnifier to find out whether there are tubercles in the sputum: the legal psychologist may in the future use his mental microscope to make sure whether there are lies in the mind of the suspect.”50
Theoretically capable of measuring to a thousandth of a second—though in practice this level of accuracy was extremely difficult to achieve51—the chronoscope was used to measure the length of time it took a subject to utter an associated word in response to a stimulus word. Through the “exact and subtle study of mental associations … a deep insight” could be “won into the whole mental mechanism.”52 The content of the associations was as important as the time it took to produce them: “Those words which by their connection with the crime stir up deep emotional complexes of ideas will throw ever new associations into consciousness, while the indifferent ones will link themselves in a superficial way without change.”53 In such a way “the mind betrays its own secrets.” Münsterberg illustrated his methods with a description of how he obtained a confession of guilt from Harry Orchard, the man who had confessed to the 1905 murder of the ex-governor of Idaho, Frank Steunenberg. Millions of readers across the country were following the trial.54 “I began with some simple psychological tricks,” Münsterberg wrote, “with which every student of psychology is familiar.” Having shown the murderer some “tactical illusions,” the psychologist claimed he had managed to bring the man “entirely under the spell of the belief that I had some special scientific powers.”55 “The time will come,” he concluded, “when the methods of experimental psychology cannot be excluded from the court of law.”56
Hubristic predictions about psychology’s impact on the legal system were regularly made in the press. A 1907 New York Times article, “Applied Psychology and Its Possibilities,” was typical.57 “Recent Discoveries in Mental Science Lay Bare the Mind of the Criminal to the Psychic Expert” proclaimed the headline, “Remarkable Part Which the Modern Laboratory May Play in the Great Court Trials of the Future.” “Psychology is most important in its application to legal evidence,” said Professor R. S. Woodworth of Columbia University. “There are a number of difficulties connected with the testimony of witnesses which are essentially psychological difficulties.”58 Psychologists had lately been turning their attention to these matters, according to Woodworth, eager “to be able to do for law what has been done for medicine by physiology…. They hope to substitute exact tests for vague general impressions.”59 The most important application of psychology was evidently the detection of false testimony. The professor described the word association/chronoscope method for determining guilt. The reporter then asked if “an infallible test could be evolved for detecting liars by means of their emotional expression?” Woodworth responded that although infallibility was unlikely because some people “actually believe the lies they tell” (as had been the case with Harry Orchard, as Münsterberg had discovered), eventually tests would indeed be able to catch the majority of deceptive witnesses. “All that psychologists hope to do is to make knowledge accurate where it is now inaccurate,” said Woodworth. As the piece demonstrated, the most fascinating and newsworthy aspects of applied psychology concerned machines that could “detect a man in the act of telling a lie.”60
These instruments articulated the dreams of applied psychology. A 1908 Harper’s Weekly piece vividly articulated the fantasy: “One can imagine a witness giving evidence in court, while the soul machine records his emotions on a screen before the jury; and the conclusion will be drawn that the witness would be inclined to tell the truth rather than explain to the jury the reasons for the excursions of the galvanic wave.”61 There had recently been perfected one particular instrument, the author claimed, “which promises to achieve results revolutionary to our whole social system, our ethics and jurisprudence.”62 “It is a gauge of truth: in contact with it one cannot speak, even think, falsely without detection.” Frank Marshall White’s piece provided a more elaborate description of the “electric psychometer” than the New York Times article had some eighteen months earlier.63 In addition to a detailed explanation of the galvanometer and the accompanying word association technique, the Harper’s Weekly feature also printed photographs of “the inventor,” Dr. Frederick Peterson, and “the machine at work.” Recent experiments had proved that the electric psychometer—“already in practical use by neurologists—was possessed of limitless possibilities in the detection of crime and of false evidence on the witness stand. By its means the hidden thoughts of the subject may be reached, the secrets most carefully guarded in his innermost consciousness wrested from him, and his emotions measured mathematically. It is already in use to detect the lie the patient tells his physician, and it will doubtless be employed to detect the lie the criminal tells the police, the lie uttered by the perjurer in court.” Detectives would have to abolish the coarse, brutal, and generally inconclusive methods of the third degree, and instead seek “scientifically accurate results by means of the more refined torture of the psychometer.”64 The article contained the first description of the questioning of a suspect in a manner that would become typical of the detection of deception, and it also used a sign that lie detection discourse would later find indispensable, the accuracy statistic: “in ninety-nine cases out of one hundred it would create an emotional complex that would register itself on the psychometer.”65 It even described a methodological innovation that polygraph operators would later use extensively: the sham experiment.66
The press encouraged scientists to claim that the new machines could discern mental facts by measuring bodily effects in order to diagnose morbid conditions. The newspapers were fascinated by McLane Hamilton’s “mysterious little machine,” Pete
rson’s “soul machine,” and Münsterberg’s “machine for cure of liars.” Spectacular knowledge claims found receptive audiences. Having emerged from the new psychology, the popularity of these “truth-compelling machines” was also partly a function of their ability to resonate with broader social concerns such as the fight against crime. Science and technology was to assist the quest for law and order. A brief notice in the Scientific American Supplement for 1909 was typical of the progressive sensibility: “Photography in the Service of the Law. The Scientific Detection of Crime.”67 The piece was illustrated with a picture of the “microphotographic camera” and a number of images taken with it. “These few examples,” the article concluded, “may serve to give an idea of the important service which photography, in the hands of experts, is able to render to the cause of justice.”68 A reviewer for Current Literature predicted in 1911 that “the great scientist will supersede the great detective.” Employing science to fight crime was doubly necessary now that criminals were arming themselves with the new scientific techniques. “The swindler and the murderer are proving themselves psychologists of power, chemists of great knowledge, electricians of genius. The great detective must meet the great criminal upon a plane of intellectual equality. He fails to do that nowadays, and this circumstance accounts for the relatively large amount of undetected and mysterious crime.”69 The training of the detective of the future would take place in the scientific laboratory. The caption to a photograph of a physiological laboratory at the Sorbonne suggested that a certain Professor Lapicque was “A Sherlock Holmes of Science.” It was here that “the Paris police have more than once made tests that brought some evildoer to destruction.”70 “In physical science the fundamental thing is laboratory experiment,” agreed The Literary Digest, “and something of the same kind is necessary in the study of crime if we are to have trustworthy knowledge and permanent results.”71 Describing the workings of the galvanometer in Harper’s Weekly, one physician admitted that although the mechanism by which the conscious will acted on the body was unknown, passion nevertheless had an emphatic effect on “heart, lungs, vessels, sweat glands, muscles, on all motile portions of the body. These things being so, why should not some instrument measure thought by its effects on the body? To be sure!”72 Linking science and mystery, body and mind, and technology and humanitarian progress, the physician asserted that the galvanometer would “become exalted as a mind-reader, and ‘sweat-box’ interviews [would] take rank as scientific performances instead of will-breakers.”73
Studying a criminal in his cell “mentally, morally, and physically, and with instruments of precision” constitutes a laboratory, asserted Arthur MacDonald, who wished to “turn our prisons into laboratories for studying the symptoms of evil-doers.”74 MacDonald’s proposal is instructive because of the contrast between its own encyclopedic ambitions and the lie detector’s humble efficiency. His ultimate target—the criminal degenerate—would be of no concern to the lie detector’s advocates. MacDonald proposed that his painstaking study “would consist in a physical, mental, moral, and social study of each boy, including such data as age, date of birth, height, weight, sitting height, color of hair, eyes, skin, first born, second born, or later born, strength of hand grasp, left-handed, length, width, and circumference of head, distance between zygomatic arches, corners of eyes, length and width of ears, hands, and mouth, thickness of lips, measurements of sensitivity to heat and pain, examination of lungs, eyes, pulse, and respiration, nationality, occupation, education, and social condition of parents, whether one or both are dead or drunkards, stepchildren or not, hereditary taint, stigmata of degeneration.”75 Having written the first American treatise on criminal anthropology ten years earlier, MacDonald remained committed to Lombroso’s personological theory of the born criminal. Because criminality was thought to be manifested in multiple ways, enormous efforts had to be devoted to discovering “all the corporal manifestations” of the criminal’s being. But as MacDonald described it, even though criminal anthropology’s methods were laborious they could not guarantee results.
In 1911, a New York Times article was intriguingly titled “Electric Machine to Tell Guilt of Criminals.”76 “If It Is Perfected So As to Be Infallible,” claimed the subheading, “It Will Make Expert Testimony Unnecessary and May Eliminate Juries in Trials.” The iconography of the piece was revealing. Portraits of Professor Edward R. Johnstone and Dr. Henry H. Goddard were placed at the bottom of the page above a photograph of the psychometer. Two further views of the psychometer were placed below the headline. Connecting the five pictures was an illustration that would later play an enormous rhetorical role within lie detector discourse: the graphical record of the examination. “A Record of the Psychometer” was the caption; “Note the Disturbance in the Patient When the Word Whiskey Was Spoken.” Sure enough, the tortuous vertical line indeed showed a disturbance—a high peak—following the utterance of the important word. The piece began with a futuristic fictional flourish: “May it please your Honor, the State accuses this man of the murder of his wife. I offer for your Honor’s inspection these documents which prove beyond a doubt that the prisoner is guilty.” “The documents are the records made by various instruments to which the prisoner was subjected in the State’s psychical laboratory, and your Honor will find recorded there the incontrovertible evidence that this man committed the crime, the exact details showing every step taken prior to, during, and after the murder, the motives, and the attempts to throw suspicions upon others.” The fantasy continued by directing the judge to “consult the record of the psychometer” for evidence of the prisoner’s weakening determination: “a full confession will be forthcoming in a short time. In view of this conclusive proof the State asks for the maximum penalty of the law.”77 There was every reason to believe, the piece concluded, “that it will be a common thing for our grandchildren or our great-grandchildren to listen to just such arguments in criminal cases.”
The writer was convinced of the psychometer’s future role in the courts: “There will be no jury, no horde of detectives and witnesses, no charges and countercharges, and no attorney for the defense. These impedimenta of our courts will be unnecessary. The State will merely submit all suspects in a case to the tests of scientific instruments, and as these instruments cannot be made to make mistakes nor tell lies, their evidence will be conclusive of guilt or innocence, and the court will deliver sentence accordingly.”78 It is not surprising that great things were expected of it, given that “even in its present crude state no living man can conceal his emotions from the uncanny instrument.” Nor was it implausible to imagine that the men who were “delving deeply into the most intangible of all things—human thoughts and emotions”—would “go down into scientific history.” Although the piece had opened with a description of the instrument’s potential legal impact, it was, however, predominantly a description of how the psychometer could be used to diagnose the “insane or weak-minded” thus benefiting “the mental health of the entire race.” The article described the activities and ambitions of Johnstone, a leader of the American eugenics movement and Superintendent of the New Jersey Training School for Feeble-Minded Boys and Girls in Vineland, and Goddard, Director of Research. It was Goddard who explained to the reporter that the psychometer could be used to see whether or not a child with Down Syndrome “had any emotion in him or not.” The presence of a female assistant or the sight of a piece of candy would apparently effect a reaction. The plan was to “take up the emotions one by one until we know just what departments of the feeble minds are dead and what are still alive. In that way we will have some basis for future psychologists to work upon in the hope of improving minds which to-day are hopeless even under the best treatment.”79 Despite describing the scientists as being “big-hearted” and “self-sacrificing,” the article concluded on a sinister note: “if, a hundred years from now, there is an insane or a weak-minded person in all the world, it will not be the fault of Goddard or Johnstone.”
The research at Vineland was motivated by a commitment to eugenics, the science of the managed selection of people according to their putative “fitness.” Appointed director of research in 1906, Henry Goddard was “a superenthusiast of the eugenics movement,” obsessed with halting the spread of feeble-mindedness.80 Goddard demonstrated the connections between feeblemindedness and criminality in two books, The Kallikak Family (1912) and The Criminal Imbecile (1915).81 These works of eugenics propaganda enjoyed a wide readership thanks to their richly mythopoeic storytelling qualities.82 In 1908 Goddard had returned from a trip to Europe armed with a new method for measuring intelligence. The Binet-Simon tests he had encountered in Belgium suggested that the current system, which was based on medical classifications of feeble-mindedness—such as “microcephaly” and “Mongolism,” could be replaced with a uniform scale of achievement based instead on performative abilities.83 Intelligence tests promised to be able to identify the unfit with greater accuracy than had been previously possible, but they were criticized for being inaccurate and improperly administered. This is perhaps one reason why Goddard retained an interest in instruments such as the psychometer. Earlier in his career he had used an ergograph “to test will power,” and an automatograph to measure involuntary motions.84 One inventory of the training school’s holdings lists the following pieces of apparatus: plethysmograph, pneumograph, ergograph, automatograph, dynamometer, and chronoscope.85