The Lie Detector

1913

William Moulton Marston (1893–1947)

Deception is commonplace between people and by businesses. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Western industrialized nations increasingly became consumer societies, and the problem of how to accurately detect deception became an important question. The new sciences of humanity—psychology, sociology, criminology, anthropology—were consulted for insights into how to determine the truth and its companion, the lie.

In 1895, Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso offered a very crude and unreliable device for use by the police. In 1913, Harvard undergraduate William Marston invented a device that used changes in systolic blood pressure to indicate the likelihood of deception. In 1914, Italian psychologist Vittorio Benussi invented the pneumograph, which used changes in breathing to detect lying.

Marston went on to earn a law degree and a doctorate in psychology after World War I. As the first professor of the psychology of law in the United States, Marston pursued research on emotionality and deception at American University in Washington, D.C. He billed himself as the father of the lie detector, but in 1921, John Larson of the University of California combined Marston’s use of changes in systolic blood pressure with his own idea of measuring changes in the galvanic skin response to create a more reliable instrument. One of Larson’s protégés later invented a portable lie detector.

The Larson lie detector was the first to be used widely in police work, although it was not universally trusted. The common strategy used by law enforcement for many years was the “third degree,” the brutal face-to-face confrontation of a suspect in the hopes of a breakdown and confession, but courts became unsympathetic to this approach. In contrast, the lie detector offered hope of a scientific counterweight to deception. In the United States, each state has its own laws about the admissibility of polygraph evidence, while in federal courts it is up to the judge whether it is admissible.

There is a curious footnote to the lie detector. William Marston later created the comic book character Wonder Woman, whose golden lasso of truth was the equivalent of a lie detector.

SEE ALSO Psychology of Testimony (1902), Mininformation Effect (1994)

Polygraph tests measure changes in systolic blood pressure and the galvanic skin response in order to indicate the likelihood of deception.