Is the Lie Detector an American Obsession? A response to K. Alder

"This is an important book. It is the best work that has appeared in the field in a long, long while. It’s a fascinating, terribly overdue historical assessment, a semi-supplement to Trovillo’s (1939; 1940) early history and a personalityfocused extension of Bunn’s (1998) dissertation on the history of the ‘lie detector’. Alder’s book is an account of “…the lie detector [which] promised to redeem the innocent, scarify the guilty, and ensure political loyalty…” from an examination of persons and personalities of primary historical forefathers, Leonarde Keeler, Dr. John Larson, Dr. William Moulton Marston and, in a limited and terribly understated way, Fred E. Inbau, J.D."(...

Chicago: Where Polygraph Becomes a Science

In the 1920’s, earlier work on polygraph instrumentation and procedure in Europe and the United States came together in Chicago where John Reid and Fred Inbau at the Scientifi c Crime Laboratory applied extensive field observations in real life criminal cases to create the Comparison Question and semi-objective scoring technique, the factors that allowed polygraph to achieve scientific status. While Chicago was not the fi rst place the instrumental detection of deception was attempted, it was the place where the contemporary, comparison question technique was fi rst developed and polygraph became a science. Th is fortuitous development was the result of the unlikely assemblage of a remarkable group of polygraph pioneers and a ready supply of criminal suspects. It is impossible to pinpoint when people fi rst began noticing the relationship between lying and observable changes in the body. Th e early Greeks founded the science of physiognomy in which they correlated facial expressions and physical gestures to impute various personality characteristics. Th e ancient Asians noted the connection between lying and saliva concluding that liars have a diffi cult time chewing and swallowing rice when being deceptive. Clearly, behavioral detection of deception pre-dates instrumental detection of deception which, it is equally clear, is European in origin. By 1858 Etienne-Jules Marey, the grandfather of cinematography recently feted in Martin Scorsese’s fi lm Hugo, and Claude Bernard, a French physiologist, described how emotions trigger involuntary physiological changes and created a “cardiograph” that recorded blood pressure and pulse changes to stimuli such as nausea and stress (Bunn, 2012). Cesare Lombroso, oft en credited as the founder of criminology, published the fi rst of fi ve editions of L’uomo delinquente in 1876 in which he postulated that criminals were degenerates or throwbacks to earlier forms of human development. Lombroso later modifi ed his theory of “born criminals” by creating three heretical classes of criminals: habitual, insane and emotional or passionate (Lombroso, 1876). By 1898, Hans Gross, the Austrian jurist credited with starting the fi eld of criminalistics, rejected the notion of “born criminals” and postulated that each crime was a scientifi c problem that should be resolved by the best of scientifi c and technical investigative aides (Gross, 2014). In 1906, Carl Jung used a galvanometer and glove blood pressure apparatus with a word association test and concluded that the responses of suspected criminals and mental perverts were the same ( Jung, 1907). In order to appreciate the important polygraph contributions that occurred in Chicago, one needs to fi rst consider what was happening at Harvard University and in Berkeley, California at the beginning of the 2oth Century

A Hundred Years of Polygraphy: Some Primary Changes and Related Issues

"The question to be addressed is essentially: “Supposing you were a polygraph examiner in the early years of the fi eld, what are the foremost changes you have witnessed in the last 100 years?”"(...

The Behavioral Analysis Interview: Clarifying the Practice, Theory and Understanding of its Use and Effectiveness

The Behavioral Analysis Interview (BAI) is the only questioning method that has been developed specifically to help investigators sort those who are likely to be ‘guilty’ from those who are not. In its typical application the BAI is a pre-interrogation interview that is used to focus interrogational effort; however, it also can be used independently in order to circumscribe investigative efforts in those cases in which there is a fixed and relatively large number of ‘suspects’. In this paper an overview of the BAI process is provided and the findings and limitations of the extant bodies of field and laboratory research on the BAI are discussed. The paper concludes with suggestions to guide future research on the BAI

Polygraph Testing and Social Intolerance: A Warning to Examiners Outside of the United States

The use of polygraph testing in the applicant screening process for law enforcement positions is widely accepted in the United States and elsewhere. Generally, that testing includes questions related to past behaviors such as involvement in criminal activity, use of illegal drugs, falsified background information, employment misconduct and so forth. More recently some have advocated that such testing ought to include questions related to ‘social intolerance.” In this paper we argue that testing for such ‘intolerance’ is highly objectionable and is likely to encourage efforts to prohibit polygraph testing, especially so outside of the United States