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International 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
International Criminal Justice Review 23(1)
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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
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International Criminal Justice Review 23(1)
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 http://antipolygraph.org/)