Free The Lie Detectors by Ken Alder Page A

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