The Truth Machine (19 page)

In one of his first papers on the “psychophysical relations of the associative experiment,” Jung described Veraguth's investigations of the “galvanopsychophysical
reflexes.”
²⁶
In the course of these experiments, Jung reported, “it was discovered that the action of the galvanometer was not in direct relation with the strength of the irritation, but more especially with the intensity of the resulting psychical feeling tone.”
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Jung was particularly interested in this “psychical feeling tone.” His aim was to use the galvanometer to diagnose pathological “complexes of ideas,” ultimately in the hope of treating
dementia praecox
—the condition that Eugen Bleuler would rename “schizophrenia” in 1908. The reaction time association experiment, Jung wrote, “is a good means of fathoming and of analyzing the personality.
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According to the opinion of some German authors, this method should be applied for the purpose of tracing the complexes of culpability in criminals who do not confess.”
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Jung's main concern was evidently the diagnosis of mental pathology, not the unmasking of criminals per se.

In his next paper, a collaboration with Peterson, Jung hoped to compare the galvanometric and pneumographic curves, simultaneously recorded under the influence of various stimuli. The goal was a comparison between normal and insane individuals.
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Jung's experimental group consisted of patients suffering from epilepsy, dementia praecox, general paralysis, chronic alcoholism, and senile dementia.
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“The galvanic reaction depends on the attention to the stimulus,” he concluded, “and the ability to associate it with other previous occurrences. This association may be conscious but is usually subconscious.”
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But the researchers found the work frustrating due to “nervous tension,” the “forced and artificial situation of the test,” and other “inexplicable influences at work.” Nor were they impressed with their abilities to decipher the relationship “between the galvanometric and pneumographic curves.” A “surprising divergence between the influences at work upon them” produced inconsistencies. With resignation, they reported having studied hundreds of different curves, carefully measuring the length and duration of each inspiration, without managing to decipher any regular relationship or reliable correspondence between them.
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Their aim was not to ascertain guilt but rather to document “the emotions of the subconscious, roused up by questions or words that strike into the buried complexes of the soul.”
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Less than three months after the
New York Times
had reported on Jung's experiments, the newspaper carried a sensational article headlined “Invents Machines for ‘Cure of Liars' / Prof. Munsterberg Experiments to Reduce Knowledge of Truth to Exact Science / Way to Detect Criminals.”
³⁵
“Hugo Munsterberg of Harvard University has just crowned the achievements of a life devoted to psychological research by the invention of several little machines
to record the emotions and reveal the secrets of the human mind.” One scientist called them “Truth-compelling machines,” another “Machines to cure liars.” Because it was held that Münsterberg had reduced a knowledge of the truth “to an exact science,” claims were made that in a few years “no innocent person will be kept in jail, nor, on the other hand, will any guilty person cheat the demands of justice.”
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Münsterberg was not averse to making similarly sensational statements himself. “To deny that the experimental psychologist has possibilities of determining the truth-telling powers” he told the
Times
reporter, “is as absurd as to deny that the chemical expert can find out whether there is arsenic in the stomach.” In comparing the experimental psychologist to the chemical expert, Münsterberg was placing psychological knowledge on a par with chemistry. But the existence of so many apparently different “truth-compelling machines” suggested that “the truth” could be obtained through a variety of means. Designed to record the “involuntary writings of the suspect,” the automatograph, for example, consisted of a wooden sling suspended from the ceiling upon which rested the suspect's arm. The “pneumograph” recorded variations in breathing caused by emotional suggestions, while the “sphygmagraph” recorded the action of the heart. The last instrument, probably a galvanometer, “employ[ed] electricity in the form of an instrument somewhat resembling the recording telephone.”

Münsterberg's work was sufficiently well known for it to be satirized in the press. A reporter from the
New York Times
described a visit he had apparently made to “Prof. Hugo Monsterwork” at his home to see his “machine for distinguishing true statements from false.” Monsterwork enthused about his “great invention … the wonder of the age” that he had discussed at a recent meeting of the “German-American Metaphysical, Dabbledabble and Subsequent Beer Society.” Some of the other marvels on display at “Villa Psyche” were “liar-detecting machines” such as the “Fibbograph” and the “Mendaxophone,” and other more specialized devices such as the “Ancestrophone,” the “Courtesycometer,” and the “Pie-crustograph.”
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Münsterberg responded to the criticism by accusing the newspapers of having a deluded fascination with invention: “All these instruments of registration have belonged for decades to the ordinary equipment of every psychological laboratory,” he explained. “It was therefore a sad commentary when, recently, scores of American papers told their readers that I invented the sphygmograph, the automatograph, and the plethysmograph last summer—they might just as well have added that I invented the telegraph last spring. To recent years belongs only the application of these instruments to the study of feelings and emotions.”
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Münsterberg's interpretations of the various tests demonstrated that he was committed to a personological theory of criminal types: “The emotional retardation of suspicious associations, characteristic of the average criminal, was, as expected, entirely lacking in this wholesale murderer. That does not mean that he lacks feeling; my experiments showed the opposite. To be sure, his sensitiveness for pain was, as with most criminals, much below the average.”
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Münsterberg believed in “average criminals” who had specific mental and physical characteristics, evidenced in his commitment to a Lombrosoian discourse of criminal difference. Münsterberg's machines were not lie detectors. They were “machines for the cure of liars,” “truth-compelling machines,” or even “scientific crime detectors” according to
Scientific American,
⁴⁰
but they did not detect lies in the normal person. Münsterberg had even said, “The word lie is not in my lexicon.”
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He was defending himself against accusations of mendacity, but the target of Münsterberg's researches was not the lie, but the personological notion of the morbid “complex of ideas” as indicative of a deeper psychopathology.

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.
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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.
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His first such piece, “Nothing But the Truth,” discussed the bearing of psychological perception experiments on the reliability of witness testimony.
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The article inspired a
New York Times
commentary headlined “A Psychologist's Judicial Warning / Munsterberg Writes of Errors in Observation Due to Personal Equation.”
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“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.”
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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”
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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.”
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What was effective were “the methods of measurement of association which experimental psychology [had] developed in recent years.”
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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.”
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Theoretically capable of measuring to a thousandth of a second—though in practice this level of accuracy was extremely difficult to achieve
⁵¹
—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.”
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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.”
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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.
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“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.”
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“The time will come,” he concluded, “when the methods of experimental psychology cannot be excluded from the court of law.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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“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.
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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.”
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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.”
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It even described a methodological innovation that polygraph operators would later use extensively: the sham experiment.
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