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International Criminal Justice Review 23(1)
Back to Lie Detection / Home PageInternational Criminal Justice Review 23(1), pp. 98-100.
RevGeoffrey_12.doc
Geoffrey C. Bunn
The Truth Machine: A Social History of the Lie Detector. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. viii,
246 pp. $34.95. ISBN-13:978-1-4214-0530-8
Reviewed by:John J. Furedy, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada and Christine Furedy, York University, Toronto
Canada
DOI: 10.1 177/1057567712470135
This is a social history in Johns Hopkins' Studies in the History of Technology series which is a wide-ranging collection approaching 50 books. This volume traces the history of the development of the polygraph for the detection of deception up to about 1950, linking the technology to the emergence of criminology and to the depiction of crime in popular culture, with an emphasis on the charismatic personalities who pursued "criminal man" and deception.
The book has chapters that will be of interest to criminologists, anthropologists, and psychologists but the complete book may not entirely satisfy any of these professionals or even the general reader. The disappointment stems from the fact that Geoffrey Bunn does not address two important questions about the polygraph, despite the impression conveyed by the jacket blurb: Does the machine really reliably detect deception and what are the social consequences of its widespread use in the United States?
The first four chapters are premised on the argument that a lie detector could not be developed as long as criminals were thought to be distinctive and set apart from normal human beings. The concept of pathological homo criminalis that held sway until about 1915 (particularly in criminal anthropology) saw the criminal as savage or subhuman, incapable of empathy, and lacking normal emotions and reactions. Women as a whole were a subset: inherently secretive, deceptive and duplicitous, enslaved by their bodies, and irrational.
This criminal anthropology pursued by the Italian Cesare Lombroso and his followers was gradually challenged so that the criminal was no longer depicted as a species apart, women were accepted as similar to men, and crime was seen as a normal aspect of society. This permitted the emergence of criminology as a discipline. Only then, argues Bunn, could the concept of a "truth machine," a concept already conjured in fiction and especially the new crime fiction, be translated into reality. (Indeed, Bunn argues that the writers of detective pulp fiction helped demolish the concept of an inherently criminal type.) The lie detector would come to embody the dream of criminology in the United States, with the lie replacing criminal man as an essential problem for criminology.
The technology of lie detection emerged from experiments with various machines that sought to measure mental states or emotions by measuring responses of the body. The history of the sphygmagraph, the chrononscope, the "electric psychometer," and finally the polygraph (which measures blood pressure, respiration, and electrical skin conductance or the galvanic skin response) and their
proponents is set against the fascination in popular fiction from the late 19th century onward with a "truth machine."
A great deal of space is devoted to the issue of who invented the lie detector. Bunn details the contending claims of John Augustus Larson, William Moulton Marston, and Leonarde Keeler. But he questions whether it is appropriate to speak of the lie detector being "invented." The issue of invention was important to the protagonists because of "a mythic tradition of invention" whereby inventors became heroic figures, epitomizing an ordinary individual who could achieve great technological advance. It was also important to claim that there was an invention because that seemed to confer scientific status for methods of testing and measurement that had been developed many years before. So "invention" gave the lie detector credibility via a culturally valued origin myth, and this myth was promoted in mass culture through newspapers, popular psychology books, magazine articles, and the like. The origin myth deflected attention from the fact that the technology, besides measuring physiological responses, also depended on the polygrapher using age-old methods of detecting deception by scrutinizing body language, facial expression, words, and gestures.
Bunn examines how the lie detector gained acceptability and credibility. An important aspect was its promotion as a counter to "third degree" methods in police departments; it was touted as a humane technology. At the same time, essential contradictions developed, for the mystique of the "black box" and of the scientific polygrapher served to intimidate and even to threaten, heightening the likelihood of a confession, the ultimate goal of the polygrapher working with a police department. These contradictions form the central theme of the book.
The two men most responsible for the increasing use of the lie detector in the United States up to the 1940s were William Marston and Leonarde Keeler. Marston made a transition from an academic to a popular psychologist. He proposed that the lie detector could be used to resolve emotional problems of couples as well as being used in crime solving. He created Wonder Woman, a cartoon character who had a lasso of truth. He later argued that the detector could be used to eliminate crime in society by breaking down habits of lying and promoting the telling of truth.
While Marston popularized the concept of the lie detector, Leonarde Keeler pursued the goal of attaining scientific respectability for his methods and gaining the lie detector's acceptance in police departments, first through his close relationship with August Vollmer, (head of the Berkeley Police Department from 1909 to 1932) and then when he was hired as the polygraph operator for Northwest University's Scientific Criminal Detection Laboratory in 1930. He had several spectacular successes in uncovering crime and began propagating the "Keeler lie detector" while training polygraphers, finally founding his own lie detecting company. He was famous enough by the 1940s to play himself in the movie Call Northside 777. It seems he may have been the inspiration behind the comic book character Dick Tracy. And thus the lie detector continued to claim scientific status while being embedded in popular culture.
In discussing why the polygraph became established in the United States, Bunn argues that it could not have emerged in Britain because there it was accepted that lying was a normal part of society. But in the United States, the Puritan legacy created a public intolerance of lying while the belief in the potential of technology coincided with the professionalization of the police and an intense interest in crime in the media. The lie became a central problem for criminology and a preoccupation of crime fiction. Bunn argues that, ultimately, the technology was "socially constructed" on the boundary between criminology and the wider culture, and so developed a Janus-like character.
In the final chapter "Hazards of the will to truth" Bunn sums up the contradictions of the polygraph
This is a discourse in which scientists become celebrities, scientific instruments acquire magical agency, and standardized practices allow the nonviolent to become violent. It is a discourse that blurs distinctions
between the eye and the ear, the scientific and the spectacular, the endogenous and the exogenous, and the normal and the pathological. The polygraph's power is its ability to maintain credibility while tolerating these essential tensions.
This well-researched early history of the pursuit of lie detection and the beginnings of criminology contains much that makes for compelling reading. But one is left with a disappointment that there is only the briefest note in the introduction on the current status of the polygraph in the United States and the legal and societal tensions that its widespread employment continues to generate. (For some current opposition to the lie detector especially in the United States, see