Free The Lie Detectors by Ken Alder Page B

prosecutors that he had "not the slightest doubt" Orchard was telling the truth.
    Regrettably, on his return to Boston, he confided this conclusion to a reporter. By morning his verdict had been wired to every newspaper in the country. Editorials excoriated the presumptuous expert who dared to usurp lay justice. Journalists began to refer to Münsterberg as "Monsterwork." Jurists denounced his pandering to the newspapers as "yellow psychology." And his colleagues wondered how "Dr. Münsterberg can have the face to ply the American public with these shallow, platitudinous half truths." Yet the professor was not one to retreat from a good Kulturkampf. He did moderate his views after Haywood was acquitted. (In his draft essay on Orchard, he wrote, "My nerves protest against twelve jurymen in rocking chairs, each one rocking in his own rhythm…. [A] few hours of experimenting were more convincing than anything…in all those weeks of the trial.") But he still insisted publicly that the time would soon come when "the methods of experimental psychology cannot longer be excluded from the court of law." And it wasn’t long before other scientists echoed his hope that "truth-compelling machines" would soon be adopted by the courts. In 1911, an article in the New York Times asked readers to look forward to the time when all judicial questions would be decided by impartial machinery.
    There will be no jury, no horde of detectives and witnesses, no charges and countercharges, and no attorney for the defense. These impedimenta of our courts will be unnecessary. The State will merely submit all suspects in a case to the tests of scientific instruments, and as these instruments cannot be made to make mistakes nor tell lies, their evidence would be conclusive of guilt or innocence, and the court will deliver sentence accordingly.
    As a college junior working in Münsterberg’s lab, William Moulton Marston was captivated by this vision—and the career it promised. Marston was a jaunty young man from a good Massachusetts family, in step with the rhythm of the new century. He had already written a prizewinning "photoplay" entitled "Jack Kennard, Coward," based on the real-life story of a football player at Harvard, crushed by gambling debts, who wins back the love of his girl. And Marston had a knack for trumpeting his achievements. As he informed one reporter during his senior year: "This study of the psychophysics of deception is going to prove a great help to me when I begin to practice law."
    Marston was determined to cut his own path. As he informed Professor Münsterberg, he had discovered that some of his fellow students enjoyed lying so much that their response times actually contracted on the word-association test. How could Münsterberg’s favorite test distinguish these eager liars from confident truth-tellers? At this impasse, Marston recalled, he told his adviser he would take the advice of a young woman friend from Mount Holyoke: he examined his heart. He married Elizabeth Holloway, "the girl from Mt. Holyoke," and together they proved that by keeping intermittent track of a storyteller’s blood pressure they could pick out 96 percent of the liars, whereas ordinary student-jurors were fooled half the time. On the promise of this method, he enrolled for both a J.D. and a Ph.D. in psychology.
    Münsterberg died just before America entered the Great War against his homeland. But Marston proved an apt disciple, and wartime was propitious for testing deception. Robert Mearns Yerkes, the chief of the psychological branch of the National Research Council—the same outfit that designed the IQ test for the mass army—agreed to sponsor Marston’s research so long as he followed new, more rigorous protocols. Applying his methods to twenty detainees in the Boston municipal court, he identified 100 percent of the liars, compared with 75 percent identified with a method of tracking breathing patterns recently proposed by an Italian