by Ian Leslie
In the first decades of the twentieth century, new tests of personality and intelligence promised to bring clarity and objectivity to the messy business of human character and behaviour. Hopes for a ‘truth-compelling machine’ formed part of America’s burgeoning optimism about the potential of such science to transform society. A 1911 article in the New York Times predicted a future in which ‘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.’
The cradle of this optimism was Berkeley, California, a young town formed around a new public university – the University of California – intended by its founders to outshine the old colleges back East. The trustees hoped that the campus they created, surrounded by the Contra Costa hills and commanding sublime views of the ocean, would become known as ‘the Athens of the Pacific’, and by the early twentieth century Berkeley was approaching the fulfilment of this dream. The town had become a magnet for America’s best students, intellectuals and artists, and renowned for its early embrace of new technologies like the telephone and the streetcar.
Berkeley’s police department was making a name for itself as the most progressive in the country, under the visionary leadership of August Vollmer, today regarded as the father of modern American law enforcement. A tall, ramrod-backed man with steely blue eyes and a fierce intellectual curiosity, Vollmer believed passionately in the potential of technology to revolutionise policing. One of his goals was to substitute humane scientific techniques for the traditional third-degree interrogations meted out by police forces around the country. As Berkeley police chief, he recruited clever, scientifically educated men who wouldn’t normally consider a career in law enforcement, and encouraged them to innovate. One of his first recruits was John Larson.
Studious, intense, self-questioning and a terrible shot, Larson made for an unlikely policeman. He had moved to Berkeley to study for a PhD in physiology and forensic science after writing his Master’s thesis on the cutting-edge technique of fingerprint identification. Larson deeply admired Vollmer and shared his vision of a more civilised and efficient method of policing. In 1920, he became the first man in the country to be in simultaneous possession of a police badge and a doctorate.
A few weeks before the interview with Margaret Taylor, Larson had read an article by a Harvard student named William Moulton Marston. The paper was entitled ‘Physiological Possibilities of the Deception Test’, and it proposed a correlation between a subject’s blood pressure and the likelihood they were telling the truth. Excited by the potential of this discovery for police work, Larson, advised by Marston, used the research as a basis for the design and construction of an unwieldy device he called the cardio-pneumo-psychograph. The case of the College Hall thefts was the first time he had been able to use it for real. Apparently, it worked: Science Nabs Sorority Sneak, read one of the local paper’s headlines, after Helen Graham’s arrest. Larson was flushed with success.4 A delighted August Vollmer gave the go-ahead for further work on the machine. He also landed Larson with a collaborator.
Leonarde Keeler was born in 1903 to the poet, naturalist and free-thinking bohemian Charles Keeler, who named his son in homage to Leonardo Da Vinci. A confident, technically gifted young man and an accomplished amateur magician, Leonarde had little patience for formal education. He was barely out of school when he read in the Berkeley press that the police were using something called a lie detector, and found himself gripped by the idea. Vollmer, a friend of Charles, appointed young Keeler to the force at Charles’s suggestion, encouraging Larson to collaborate with this bright young man on the machine. The partnership proved fruitful. Keeler increased the number of physical signs that the lie detector monitored and made the device smaller, so that it could fit into a box. The new portable machine recorded pulse rate, blood pressure, respiration, and ‘electrodermal response’ (palm sweat) on a series of graphs. Today’s polygraph (named by Keeler) is much the same device.
Between 1921 and 1923 in Berkeley, Larson and Keeler tested 861 subjects in 313 cases, identifying 218 criminal suspects and exonerating 310. Most of the crimes were petty, and some were domestic, like the marital dispute of which Larson noted ‘Mrs Simons accused of masturbation by her husband.’ Above all, the lie detector proved to be good at eliciting instantaneous confessions. The mysterious machine shone a spotlight on the guilty consciences of a whole community. A restaurant chef pleaded guilty to stealing silverware, a custodian of the Unitarian Church admitted to pocketing a purse and watch. Though these successes were slight, the polygraph had shown itself highly effective across a range of different circumstances, and it promised much more. Vollmer’s dream of a cleaner, more efficient interrogation method seemed on the verge of materialising. Before long the nation’s police chiefs were making their way to Berkeley to see this machine for themselves.
Just as his invention was growing famous, however, Larson was becoming uncertain of it. He found that when he re-tested suspects after confession, their records appeared similar to those deemed innocent of the crime. He engaged in an exchange of agonised letters with Helen Graham, who had returned to Kansas following her humiliation in Berkeley. Graham, a naturally anxious soul who suffered a deeply unstable childhood, protested her innocence to Larson, who came to believe her and apologised for what had happened. (The thefts at College Hall continued, unreported.) Larson was increasingly troubled by his concerns over what, exactly, the polygraph was measuring. But to his colleagues and peers, how this machine worked was less important than that it did.
The collaboration between Larson and Keeler, although fertile, was always uneasy, and over the years they became rancorous enemies. Each fought for his own vision of the machine’s future, and competed for the approval of Vollmer. The more reflective and sceptical Larson saw the machine as an aid to scientific research and penal reform, but grew doubtful that it should be used to dispense justice. Keeler had no such uncertainties. He volunteered to solve celebrated crimes and basked in the ensuing publicity, which in turn helped him to sell his lie-detecting expertise to large corporations. Larson came to despise Keeler as a mere salesman who had prostituted the technology they had created together. As Keeler prospered, he was dogged at every step by his former colleague, who publicly denounced Keeler’s claims for the polygraph.
Larson and Keeler remained obsessed by the machine, and by each other, for the rest of their lives. Keeler’s heavy drinking led to the end of his marriage to Katherine Keeler, a glamorous and accomplished woman who trained as a forensic scientist before establishing her own all-female detective agency in Chicago. Soon after doing so she left Keeler for Rene Dussaq, a Cuban-American with a degree in philosophy from the University of Geneva who at various times was a matador, polo player, Davis Cup tennis player, fencing champion and highly decorated war hero. Katherine was killed in 1944 after the plane she was flying solo across country crashed into a field in Ohio. Keeler died of a stroke caused by alcoholism four years later, aged 46. John Larson spent the rest of his career working for various penal institutions, collecting newspaper clippings about his machine, and working on a nine thousand-page book on psychology for which he never found a publisher. He died in 1965, aged 73.
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In 1986, the American spy Aldrich Ames was notified by his bosses at the CIA that he was to take a routine polygraph test. All CIA employees were expected to take the test every five years, but due to an administrative backlog Ames hadn’t taken one in a decade. He remembered hating it the first time, but now he was terrified. The year before, having spent himself bankrupt, he had started selling information to the Soviets. Fearing the machine would reveal his betrayal, he passed a note to the KGB via his handlers, asking for advice on how to deal with it.
When he received a note back shortly before the test he open
ed it excitedly, expecting to read of a diabolically clever technique for outwitting the polygraph. Well-known counter-measures included using mental imagery to calm yourself and biting your tongue to make yourself seem anxious in response to the control questions. In fact, the KGB’s advice was to get a good night’s sleep, and try to relax in the interview. Ames was disappointed. Nevertheless, he did as they suggested, and passed the test with flying colours. In 1991 he passed it again, even as the CIA was carrying out an internal hunt for its mole.
Aldrich Ames – whose treachery was discovered in 1994, after he had betrayed the identities of most of the US spies in the Soviet Union, several of whom were executed – retained a lifelong contempt for the polygraph. In 2000, the scientist Steven Aftergood wrote a critical piece about the technology for the journal Science. That November he received a letter, handwritten across four pages, from Allenwood Federal Penitentiary, where Ames was (and is) incarcerated. In it, Ames congratulated Aftergood on his piece and delivered a witty, scathing critique of the machine, all the more authoritative for coming from one who had seen it off:
Like most junk science that just won’t die (graphology, astrology and homeopathy come to mind), because of the usefulness or profit their practitioners enjoy, the polygraph stays with us. Its most obvious use is as a coercive aid to interrogators, lying somewhere on the scale between the rubber truncheon and the diploma on the wall behind the interrogator’s desk. It depends upon the overall coerciveness of the setting — you’ll be fired, you won’t get the job, you’ll be prosecuted, you’ll go to prison — and the credulous fear the device inspires.
The polygraph is not pure hokum. A racing pulse and an increased heart rate can indicate guilt, and when combined with a skilled operator the machine can achieve high success rates (although the necessity of a skilled operator rather defeats the purpose). But Ames is right; much of the polygraph’s effectiveness is itself based on a lie – the lie of its own infallibility. Its key flaw is that there is no utterly reliable physiological sign of lying. All the symptoms it measures can have other causes, including the sheer nervousness that many honest people feel when confronted by such a test.
The lie detector never caught on in Europe, and in the country of its birth it failed to meet the standard of general scientific acceptability for evidence used in court. But the machine did become a staple of the policeman’s interrogation armoury.5 Police cared little for the science – they just knew that presenting suspects with this magical device was a great way of extracting a confession (in a scene from HBO’s The Wire, based on real-life police practices in the 1980s, officers are shown extracting confessions by putting a suspect’s hand on a photocopy machine filled with paper printed with the word LIE). The US military and intelligence services used polygraphs extensively over the years to interrogate suspected spies or terrorists, confirm the loyalty of allies, check the veracity of tip-offs and – as with Ames – check on the reliability of its own employees. But in 2001 a Pentagon report to Congress concluded that ‘national security is too important to be left to such a blunt instrument’. A 2003 report by America’s National Academy of Sciences concluded that the polygraph performed ‘well above chance, though well below perfection’. It is still used by the federal government, though rarely in law enforcement or by the military.
The polygraph insinuated itself into many areas of twentieth-century American life. In the 1930s and 1940s it was introduced, with Keeler’s help, to banks, factories and government departments eager to check on the honesty and reliability of their employees. It became a political symbol, since it met, or appeared to meet, a demand for certainty about individual integrity that grew more strident as the country moved on to a Cold War footing. In the trial of Alger Hiss, Richard Nixon called for the suspected spy Whittaker Chambers to take the test even though, as Nixon remarked to a friend, ‘I don’t know anything about polygraphs and I don’t know how accurate they are but I know they scare the hell out of people.’ Senator Joe McCarthy issued polygraph challenges to the 205 Americans he accused of being communists in his speech of February 1950. The polygraph also became a pop cultural icon, featured in movies, TV series and magazines. It was the man whose insight led to the first polygraph prototype who best understood the machine’s cultural potency.
Born in 1893 in Boston, William Moulton Marston was a chubby-faced, ebullient, irrepressibly optimistic man. At Harvard he worked in the prestigious ‘emotion laboratory’ of Hugo Münsterberg, where Marston and his fellow students experimented with an apparatus that registered responses to emotions such as horror and tenderness through the graphical tracing of pulse rates. One student volunteer was Gertrude Stein, who later wrote of the experience in the third person: ‘Strange fancies begin to crowd upon her, she feels that the silent pen is writing on and on forever.’ Marston was the only one of the three men with a claim to the invention of the polygraph never to have worked in law enforcement. Instead, his research into deception launched a colourful career that saw him become America’s first pop psychologist.
During the 1930s Marston often appeared in magazines such as Esquire and Family Circle, carrying out his ‘deception test’ on willing young females, and featured as a guest on TV game shows. He was hired by Universal Studios to measure the emotional impact of their movies, and lent his expertise and name to advertising agencies, who liked using his test as an ersatz form of market research. An ad for Gillette shows Marston analysing a polygraph tracing while a man is shaving. The copy reads:
Strapped to Lie Detectors, the same scientific instruments used by G-Men and police officers throughout the country, hundreds of men take part in an astounding series of tests that blast false claims and reveal the naked truth about razor blades. These men, shaving under the piercing eye of Dr. William Moulton Marston, eminent psychologist and originator of the famous Lie Detector test, come from all walks of life, represent all types of beards and every kind of shaving problem. Knowing that the Lie Detector tells all . . . these men shave one side of the face with a Gillette Blade, the other side with substitute brands.
Marston was fascinated by the new forms of mass entertainment, and believed that with the right guidance they could help solve America’s deep-rooted emotional problems, which he put down to women not yet being the dominant gender. Women, argued Marston, were superior to men. Men had a stronger sexual appetite and a will to dominate, while women preferred to cultivate ‘the love response’. But this seeming submission would eventually enable women to take command of the species. In a hundred years, he predicted, ‘the country will see the beginning of a sort of Amazonian matriarchy.’ He viewed the lie detector as a tool to fine-tune the emotional content of culture and, by doing so, to teach men and women what they really wanted.
At home, Marston lived in a harmonious ménage a trois with his wife Elizabeth and his mistress – and research assistant – Olive Byrne. He had two sons with each woman. Elizabeth, who worked as a lawyer, was the breadwinner. Olive looked after the kids during the day and helped with Marston’s experiments. Their sons later recalled the arrangement happily. An evening’s entertainment might include hooking up a guest to the lie detector. After Marston’s death, Olive and Elizabeth continued to live together, and did so for the rest of their lives.
Of the three men who invented the lie detector, Marston was the only one who didn’t suffer for it. What may be his greatest invention was not in the fields of psychology or law enforcement, but popular culture. Marston had been invited onto the board of DC Comics, who were eager to appease critics worried about the emotional impact of comic strips on kids. He asked his new colleagues why there wasn’t a female superhero, a counterpart to Superman, and was informed, wearily, that such characters never worked. Marston responded that this was because there had never been a character who combined strength with femininity. Challenged to come up with an answer himself, Marston created Wonder Woman, who wielded a golden lasso that made all who are encircled b
y it tell the truth.
The New Truth Machines
The polygraph turned out to be rather more fallible than the lasso of truth. Today, brain-scanning techniques promise to succeed where it failed. These new technologies appear to offer the tantalising possibility of getting beyond the external signs of lying to the lie itself, written in the brain’s neuronal activity.
The two main brain-scanning technologies used for lie detection are known as EEG (electroencephalography) and fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging). EEG measures electrical activity in the brain caused by the firing of neurons, via multiple electrodes placed on the scalp of the subject. During a typical EEG-based lie detection test, the subject – or suspect – is shown a series of images and words that may or may not relate to the ‘crime’ of which he or she is accused. According to Peter Rosenfeld of Northwestern University, who has done the most to develop this technique, when somebody recognises a stimulus, they involuntarily emit a particular type of brain wave (the P300) which the administrator of the test can detect. In theory, no matter how much the suspect denies recognising the name of a fellow bank robber or the face of his victim, their P300 will blurt out the truth. This kind of technique is sometimes called the ‘guilty knowledge’ test.
When breathless articles about the end of lying are published, however, they invariably focus on fMRI, just as eighty years ago they trumpeted the polygraph. Functional MRI, invented in the early 1990s, has primarily been used as a research tool to better understand how the brain does its work. The technique produces images of the brain in action, which in an image-obsessed age is bound to attract attention. Not that fMRI isn’t worthy of it. Unlike the polygraph, it is a genuinely revolutionary technology, which has transformed the field of neuroscience.
To take an fMRI scan, a person must be lying down inside a machine that is, basically, a very large, very powerful magnet. Once in the scanner, they can be asked to perform a variety of tasks, such as listening to music, answering questions, or pressing buttons in response to images shown on a screen above them. As they do so, the technology detects which areas of the brain are more active than others. When neurons fire they consume more oxygen, which leads to an increase in the flow of oxygenated blood to the active region; this causes distortions in the local magnetic field which can be measured by the machine. These changes can then be translated into images, using highly involved – and sometimes controversial – statistical methods. The process is nuanced and complex, but the end result is attractively simple: pictures of the brain with areas of relatively high neural activity mapped in brightly coloured blobs. The theory behind the use of fMRI for lie detection is that the extra cognitive effort demanded by lying can be traced in neural activity, so when a person is asked a series of questions, and answers one of them deceptively, the lie – or rather the moment when they lied – can be picked out in red and blue.