Not Born of Science

An American Industry
Keeler eventually dubbed the machine a “polygraph”, to the disdain of Larson, who thought the term was deliberately vague and inaccurate, and only served to further Keeler’s desire to centralize his control over the industry of lie detection that was to come. The long and ultimately tragic battle between these two men frames much of the book’s narrative.

But the story doesn’t end with them. During the ‘40s and ‘50s, Cold War concerns about spies stealing nuclear secrets revitalized the lie detection industry, and it segued smoothly from there into the corporate world, vetting employees for corporate espionage, honesty and loyalty to the company, and ferreting out “undesirable” personality traits.

The lie detector has thrived in America because the instrument played into one of the greatest projects of the twentieth century: the effort to transform the central moral question of our collective life - how to fashion a just society—into a legal problem.

TV’s Lie Detectors
The success of the procedural drama has led to a resurgence in modern myths about lie detection, and an obvious example would be the character played by Tim Roth in Lie to Me, based on the real-life exploits of Paul Ekman.

Ekman has forged an industry around the idea of detecting emotions (and most popularly, lies) by watching a person’s face for “micro expressions”, which by his definition are extremely brief and subtle versions of regular facial expressions, and often appear when someone is trying to conceal an emotion. According to Ekman, lying tends to generate emotions that the liars want to conceal.

As happened in the ‘20s with the first modern lie detector, there’s some of the old shell game going on here with “micro expressions” and other cutting edge techniques for sussing out liars. It seems the public is just as eager today as it has ever been for the “secret” to knowing when someone is lying. As Vrij writes:

In principle, lies can be detected via observing someone’s behavior, analyzing their speech, or measuring their physiological responses. In all three areas practitioners and researchers can be found who make bold claims about their ability to detect lie that they fail to back up with research findings.

Even though Ekman’s fictional persona always catches the bad guy by watching for “micro expressions”, in real life Ekman has always been quick to concede the point made by Vrij, writing, “...We have not found any behavioral change that always occurs in every person who is lying.”

“There are no signs of lying itself, only hot spots,” he writes in Emotions Revealed. “[But] hot spots are not proof of lying.”

What Makes A Good Liar?
Vrij also points out, “...Some people are very good liars.” The notion that a liar is concealing an emotion, or that there’s a physiological change in a liar’s body during the act of lying, doesn’t seem to apply to these people, and eliminates them from detection by any machine.

Which begs the question, how do you tell a lie, and tell it well? Vrij identifies three characteristics common to good liars: their behavior doesn’t arouse suspicion; they find it easy to lie; and when they lie, they don’t feel emotions such as fear, guilt, or delight.

“I think that these three criteria include right characteristics: (i) being a natural performer; (ii) being well prepared; (iii) being original; (iv) thinking rapidly; (v) being eloquent; (vi) having a good memory; (vii) not experiencing feelings of fear, guilt, or duping delight while lying; and (viii) being good at acting.”

The Kinky History of Wonder Woman
Back to the book for one more irresistible digression: Larson was influenced by work done at the time by William Moulton Marston, a Harvard psychologist and lawyer, who went on to create “Wonder Woman” as “the embodiment, he said, of all the psychological principles behind his technique of honesty testing”.

After being denied an opportunity to present his lie detection findings in court, in a 1922 case that set the precedent for disallowing lie detector evidence, Marston worked in various academic jobs, “while parlaying his study of the lie detector into a grand unified theory of the emotions”. Then in 1941, he created Wonder Woman, whose “magic lasso, which compels obedience, is the ultimate lie detector.”

The book quotes Marston as saying, “‘Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule the world.’”

For dramatic and visual punch, Marston relied heavily on imagery of enslavement and emancipation, with (scantily clad) women led in chains, hypnotized into submission, and otherwise disciplined—only to overcome their bondage thanks to Wonder Woman.

This revelation of her character’s origins suggests an adult (and unlikely) direction the comic book could take, one that embraces the fetish elements central to her story.

Many of Wonder Woman’s adversaries were women likewise endowed with sexual and physical powers, except that they sought unbounded domination. By contrast, Wonder Woman reformed her opponents on Paradise Island, where they were put in shackles until they had learned to follow her own ‘loving submission to authority’.

Why the Lie Detector Won’t Die
As a culture history of lie detection, the book raises fascinating psychological questions that may have been cultivated in the US, but by book’s end, Alder describes how other countries have picked up on the notion of lie detection, and the power inherent in it. As a collection of strange stories of odd people who influenced global pop culture, the book is even more interesting.

And as damning as Alder’s argument is, the industry of lie detection isn’t likely to go away.

The lie detector cannot be killed by science, because it is not born of science. Its habitat is not the laboratory or even the courtroom, but newsprint, film, television, and of course the pulps, comic books, and science fiction.