Geoffrey C. Bunn - The Truth Machine: A Social History of the Lie Detector

The Truth Machine

JOHNS HOPKINS STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY
Merritt Roe Smith, Series Editor

A Social History of the Lie Detector

Geoffrey C. Bunn

2012 The Johns Hopkins University Press
All rights reserved. Published 2012
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bunn, G. C. (Geoffrey C.)
The truth machine : a social history of the lie detector / Geoffrey C. Bunn.
p. cm. (Johns Hopkins studies in the history of technology)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN -13: 978-1-4214-0530-8 (hdbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN -13: 978-1-4214-0651-0 (electronic)
ISBN -10: 1-4214-0530-x (hdbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN -10: 1-4214-0651-9 (electronic)
1. Lie detectors and detectionHistory. 2. Lie detectors and detection
United StatesHistory. I. Title.
HV8078.B86 2012
363.25 4dc23 2011044971

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What therefore is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms: in short a sum of human relations which become poetically and rhetorically intensified, metamorphosed, adorned, and after long usage seem to a nation fixed, canonic and binding; truths are illusions of which one has forgotten they are illusions, worn-out metaphors which have become powerless to affect the senses; coins which have their obverse effaced and now are no longer of account as coins but merely as metal.

Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense (1873)

It is so easy to do wrong! Everything the Devil makes runs easily. It is only Gods machinery which has friction. The lie is spontaneous;the truth requires thought. Yet the offhand production is born with the seeds of decay in it, and its other name is Death. Its history is always cyclical, and returns upon itself; for the path of a lie is so tortuous that, sooner or later, it is bound to intersect its own course. Then comes discovery, humiliation, painretribution. The hyperbola of deception has never yet been plotted.

Milton L. Severy, The Mystery of June 13th (1905)

Plotting the Hyperbola of Deception 1

A thieves quarter, a devils den: The Birth of Criminal Man

A vast plain under a flaming sky: The Emergence of Criminology

Supposing that Truth is a womanwhat then?:
The Enigma of Female Criminality

Fearful errors lurk in our nuptial couches:
The Critique of Criminal Anthropology

To Classify and Analyze Emotional Persons:
The Mistake of the Machines

Some of the darndest lies you ever heard:
Who Invented the Lie Detector?

A trick of burlesque employed against dishonesty:
The Quest for Euphoric Security

A bally hoo side show at the fair:
The Spectacular Power of Expertise

The Hazards of the Will to Truth

The Truth Machine

An increased liberalism in the definition of fact can have grave
repercussions, while the idea that truth is concealed and even
perverted by the processes that are meant to establish it makes
excellent sense.

Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (1975)

On January 30, 1995, not long after O.J. Simpson had released I Want to Tell You, the book he hoped would clear his name, the tabloid television show Hard Copy revealed that they had subjected the double murder suspect to a lie detector test. The former football star had recorded himself on tape, reading aloud various passages from his book: I want to state unequivocally that I did not commit these horrible crimes. But this time Jack Harwood, a Veteran investigator, proclaimed Simpson absolutely truthful, noting that the lie test shows O.J. didnt do it!

One type of lie detector, identical statements from a single suspect, and two equally emphatic yet contradictory verdicts. When Simpson said, I would take a bullet for Nicole, Harwood claimed, the former football hero was being completely honest, while according to Rizzo he was absolutely lying. How can two experts both claim scientific validity for their respective instruments, analyze the same material, and reach completely different conclusions?

Early histories of the lie detector celebrated the many famous and infamous cases in which it had been used during the twentieth century.

The classic polygraph examination involves simultaneously measuring a suspects blood pressure, breathing rate, and electrical skin conductance as a series of questions that require yes or no answers are asked. But the person can also be subjected to more covert scrutiny: behavior symptoms are observed before and after the test is performed; cameras behind two-way mirrors may record gestures and nuances of expression. Talkativeness and enthusiasm may be noted, to be incorporated into the examiners final assessment of truth or deception. It seems that no lie detector examination takes place under objective scientific conditions divorced from the wider social context. And symbols lend insight into the values that underscore the lie detector test. What better emblem of masculine professional power than the briefcase, that mandatory accessory of every polygrapher? From the black briefcase comes the chart, at once a graphic calculus of guilt and a sacred scroll inscribed with the truth. Consider also the chair, a seat for the sovereign subject with whom no eye contact must be made, but also a constraining device, reminiscent of the electric chair.

The demarcation between the supposed rationality of the male polygrapher and the supposed apparent emotionality of a female subject is a salient feature of lie detector discourse. The instrument was designed to reveal the supposed invisible pathologies of the female body, an approach with a long precedent in criminology, a history that this book examines. For the science of pupillometricsthe attempt to detect dishonesty by recording changes in pupil sizethe gaze of the subject becomes the important characteristic of the deception test. In a recapitulation of criminal anthropologys fruitless search for visible stigmata of criminality, almost every body part has been subjected to testing: the hand, arm, skin, lungs, heart, muscles, voice, stomach, and brain have all been examined at some point in the history of this technology. Sometimes it has not just been the human body that has attracted pioneers. In the late 1960s, Cleve Backster achieved international notoriety for attaching his polygraph to a philodendron plant, claiming it could detect apprehension, fear, pleasure, and relief.

The traditional polygraph measures skin conductance, breathing rate, and blood pressure. The subject also undergoes intense visual scrutiny.