The Lie Detectors (7 page)

Though James’s theory drew on Darwin’s evolutionary account of the expression of emotion in animals and humans, it marked a departure as well. So eager had Darwin been to refute the Victorian theologians who believed that every human characteristic served some divine purpose—such as the pious physician who called the blush God’s way of assuring honesty—that he had ascribed emotions to the persistence of animal instinct. This recast emotions as part of the natural human endowment without assigning them any social function. James emphasized that emotions were a physiological response honed by evolutionary pressures to serve a social role, even when they ran counter to the promptings of our conscious reason.

As a crude slogan, this view met with mockery. Surely, said his critics, there must be cognition before emotion; we must decide that a bear is threatening (and not, for instance, a circus act) before we fear it. Surely our bodily reactions cannot uniquely determine our emotions; we shiver from cold as well as fear, weep from joy as well as sorrow. But partially revised, James’s theory took these features into account. More to the point, his theory could be investigated experimentally.

There was just one hitch; James hated the tedium of lab work. This made Münsterberg a godsend. James wrote his brother Henry that Münsterberg was "the ablest experimental psychologist in Germany." Luring him to Harvard would make its psychology lab the nation’s "unquestioned first." After an extended courtship, Münsterberg settled in America. "Now I am yours forever," he wrote to James.

But it was not long before James realized that in hiring Münsterberg he had unleashed a single-minded monster who would supplant his work. After all, James’s theory had preserved a small domain of action for the human will. It was not much more than the capacity to direct one’s attention, nearly a will-o’-the-wisp will. But it underscored James’s conviction that human beings could choose their sense of themselves and perform the tasks of democracy. Münsterberg’s "action theory" left no room for such wishful thinking. Münsterberg believed that our experience of conscious choice was an illusion: nothing more than our memory of often repeated bodily acts. Even when you feel you have exercised your free will—such as when you raise your right hand to take an oath—all you have really experienced is your body once again preparing your biceps, triceps, and lats to raise your arm. Münsterberg preferred the autocratic institutions of his homeland. His experimental protocols sought to recover the automatic responses beneath our public acts.

Of course, to be brought before Münsterberg’s instruments was to become the sort of person Münsterberg described. Another student at Radcliffe, the incomparable Gertrude Stein, spent several semesters in his lab. She described how under the gaze of his apparatus she became an "automaton" on which others could work their will; or as she put it in her journal, "One is indeed all things to all men in a laboratory." In other words, wasn’t a subject who could be obliged to tell the truth sufficiently pliable to tell her interrogators what they wanted to hear?

In her characteristic third-person voice Stein described how she felt herself divide in two while she watched her classmates watch her thoughts being registered on the revolving cylinder. "Strange fancies begin to crowd upon her, she feels that the silent pen is writing on and on forever." While her body is imprisoned, her mind is displayed for public amusement. "Her record is there she cannot escape it and the group about her begins to assume the shape of mocking friends gloating over her imprisoned misery."

There is some debate as to whether Stein’s prose was influenced by her encounter with induced disassociation and automatic writing. (She thought so.) But not only did Münsterberg’s program challenge Romantic notions about human creativity and autonomy; it also challenged the law’s methods for assessing human beliefs and personal responsibility. As a scientific mandarin, Münsterberg did not hesitate to speak out in public. His "scientific conscience," he said, would not let him do otherwise. In a series of muckraking articles in magazines like
McClure’s,
Münsterberg demonstrated how eyewitness testimony—even confessions—could be mistaken; how false memories could be planted by police interrogations; and how difficult it was for students to recall staged crimes accurately. On a positive note, he explained how psychology was finally turning the tables on human duplicity. In just the past decade Cesare Lombroso, an Italian who asserted that criminals constituted a distinct race, had interrogated suspects while their hand was encased in a special glove to register changes in blood pressure, on the assumption that their physiological reactions would betray their state of mind. Carl Gustav Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist, had adapted his word-association test to probe the patient’s psyche, on the assumption that a hesitant response to words relevant to the crime meant that the subject was deceiving the analyst. Jung had also tracked emotional changes with a galvanometer that recorded the conductance of current across the sweaty surface of the subject’s skin, and had even induced one young man to confess to a crime while questioning him on this device. And all these methods were akin to the efforts of Jung’s mentor, Sigmund Freud, who had tried inducing a quasi-hypnotic state in his patients so as to press them to recall repressed memories of sexual abuse, before he changed his mind and decided they were just fantasizing.

Then, in 1907, Münsterberg got a chance to try these truth-testing techniques in the most prominent trial of the time. Prosecutors invited him to Idaho to assess the honesty of Harry Orchard, a political assassin whose confession to the murder of the state’s governor had implicated western labor leaders. Millions of readers across the country were following the trial of "Big Bill" Haywood in what was billed as a titanic struggle of labor against capital. In the seclusion of the prison outside Boise, Münsterberg sat Orchard down for a battery of tests designed to "pierce his mind." The most telling of these, said Münsterberg, was the word-association test. When prompted by the word "confession," Orchard took only eight-tenths of a second to respond "true," the brevity of the lapse indicating that this answer was as innocent as his pairing of "river" with "water." After two days of gathering such data, the psychologist left the prison assuring prosecutors that he had "not the slightest doubt" Orchard was telling the truth.

Regrettably, on his return to Boston, he confided this conclusion to a reporter. By morning his verdict had been wired to every newspaper in the country. Editorials excoriated the presumptuous expert who dared to usurp lay justice. Journalists began to refer to Münsterberg as "Monsterwork." Jurists denounced his pandering to the newspapers as "yellow psychology." And his colleagues wondered how "Dr. Münsterberg can have the face to ply the American public with these shallow, platitudinous half truths." Yet the professor was not one to retreat from a good
Kulturkampf.
He did moderate his views after Haywood was acquitted. (In his draft essay on Orchard, he wrote, "My nerves protest against twelve jurymen in rocking chairs, each one rocking in his own rhythm…. [A] few hours of experimenting were more convincing than anything…in all those weeks of the trial.") But he still insisted publicly that the time would soon come when "the methods of experimental psychology cannot longer be excluded from the court of law." And it wasn’t long before other scientists echoed his hope that "truth-compelling machines" would soon be adopted by the courts. In 1911, an article in the
New York Times
asked readers to look forward to the time when all judicial questions would be decided by impartial machinery.

As a college junior working in Münsterberg’s lab, William Moulton Marston was captivated by this vision—and the career it promised. Marston was a jaunty young man from a good Massachusetts family, in step with the rhythm of the new century. He had already written a prizewinning "photoplay" entitled "Jack Kennard, Coward," based on the real-life story of a football player at Harvard, crushed by gambling debts, who wins back the love of his girl. And Marston had a knack for trumpeting his achievements. As he informed one reporter during his senior year: "This study of the psychophysics of deception is going to prove a great help to me when I begin to practice law."

Marston was determined to cut his own path. As he informed Professor Münsterberg, he had discovered that some of his fellow students enjoyed lying so much that their response times actually contracted on the word-association test. How could Münsterberg’s favorite test distinguish these eager liars from confident truth-tellers? At this impasse, Marston recalled, he told his adviser he would take the advice of a young woman friend from Mount Holyoke: he examined his heart. He married Elizabeth Holloway, "the girl from Mt. Holyoke," and together they proved that by keeping intermittent track of a storyteller’s blood pressure they could pick out 96 percent of the liars, whereas ordinary student-jurors were fooled half the time. On the promise of this method, he enrolled for both a J.D. and a Ph.D. in psychology.

Münsterberg died just before America entered the Great War against his homeland. But Marston proved an apt disciple, and wartime was propitious for testing deception. Robert Mearns Yerkes, the chief of the psychological branch of the National Research Council—the same outfit that designed the IQ test for the mass army—agreed to sponsor Marston’s research so long as he followed new, more rigorous protocols. Applying his methods to twenty detainees in the Boston municipal court, he identified 100 percent of the liars, compared with 75 percent identified with a method of tracking breathing patterns recently proposed by an Italian researcher. Yet Marston’s over-the-top success only made his seniors more suspicious.

They were not reassured by his performance in his first and only real-world case. When surgical instruments and a military codebook vanished from the U.S. Surgeon General’s office in Washington, D.C., intelligence officials suspected one of the building’s eighteen African-American messengers. Asked to find the culprit, Marston identified one man "with very strong consciousness with regard to something he had done," but he also admitted that he was not certain of the man’s guilt. The problem, he explained, was that blacks, perhaps because their will was more "primitive" than that of whites, seemed to respond differently: "The factor of voluntary control which, with white men, seems to make a deception rise regular and almost an absolute one, apparently is almost altogether lacking in negroes, so that, tho the change is really even more sharp and extreme, it is vastly more difficult to estimate norm plus excitement."

The racist assumptions on display here highlight the methodological vulnerability at the core of lie detection. No psychologist doubted that bodily changes often accompanied mental activity. The psychologists did doubt, though, that a specific change could be read as a sign of a specific mental act, like lying. In 1915 the physiologist Walter B. Cannon had published animal experiments to refute James’s theory of bodily emotions, proving that diverse stimuli could produce identical physiological responses. Dogs salivate from more than one cause. Humans cry from joy as well as sorrow. Then too, some people are more sorrowful than others. To reverse the inference, as Marston did, and assume that a specific mental state had caused the rise in blood pressure, was to abandon the norms of inductive reasoning in favor of what the philosopher Charles Peirce called abductive inference: the effort to reason one’s way backward from consequences to cause. Although such reasoning is a valuable way to generate novel ideas for testing, it is generally held suspect without further corroboration because it leaves so much scope to the prejudices of the reasoner.

Marston’s brilliant successes had simply cast suspicion on the experimenter himself. His new thesis adviser admitted that while the young man had "always proven entirely trustworthy," he was also "slightly overzealous in grasping opportunities, which causes him to take the corners a little sharply." That said, the professor couldn’t help admiring Marston, who was ambitious, resourceful, and "very much of a man." Now he just had to prove he was a scientist—in other words, that other researchers could replicate his success.

The army sent Marston to Camp Greenleaf, Georgia, to see whether other interrogators could master his technique. In a new series of deception games these interrogators were able to separate honest men from liars74.3 percent of the time—better than they did without the technique, but nowhere near Marston’s 94.2 percent success rate. So that even as the tests confirmed Marston’s skill, the psychologists could not decide whether his achievements were due to science or personal ability. Although the war ended before he had convinced his fellow psychologists, Marston did not give up. He and his wife returned to Massachusetts, where they both took the bar exam and resumed joint research on deception. He received his Ph.D. in 1921 and found a temporary academic job in Washington, D.C. while he angled for a grander stage.

It was a stage the law would deny him. In order to create a legal precedent in the Frye case, Marston first had to qualify as an expert witness. To this end, Frye’s lawyers supplied Judge William McCoy with a weighty stack of scientific reports: on emotion by William James and on lying by John A. Larson, plus Marston’s Ph.D. dissertation. But by his own admission, Judge McCoy spent only five minutes perusing these tracts before he ruled the next morning that he would not allow Marston to take the stand.