The Truth Machine: A Social History of the Lie Detector by Geoff Bunn (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Truth Machine: A Social History of the Lie Detector by Geoff Bunn Tal Golan (bio) The Truth Machine: A Social History of the Lie Detector. By Geoff Bunn. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. Pp. 246. $24.95. Geoff Bunn’s Truth Machine provides us with a novel social history of the lie detector. Earlier histories have documented the birth and development of the technology in the private spheres of the psychological laboratory and the police station. Bunn’s book successfully introduces the public sphere as a crucial site for the historical discourse regarding this most fascinating icon of modernity. Bunn is interested in the science that purports to render hidden emotions legible via physiological measurements, and in the society that embraced the technology and allowed it to flourish. These two concerns account for the book’s dual structure. The first part is focused on the development [End Page 752] of the relevant science in nineteenth-century Europe; the second, on the embrace of the technology by twentieth-century American society. Bunn insists throughout that his two investigations are related, as science both responds to social concerns and shapes them. Bunn starts by roaming through nineteenth-century Europe, to locate the origins of the science of criminology in the growing modern anxieties regarding moral and social order. The Lombrosian school of criminal anthropology, he tells us, was the first to attend to these anxieties by constructing homo criminalis as the problem and itself as the solution. The criminal man was conceived as an evolutionary and moral aberration, recognizable by a set of physiological and social markers that criminology promised to identify and control. Bunn adds a twist to this familiar narrative by paying special attention to the elevation of woman as a chief conundrum for the young discipline of criminology. Conjured to possess an intrinsic hidden culpability, the female body provided a site and an impetus for the development of the gaze, theory, and technology that would later play central roles in lie detection. According to Bunn, homo criminalis had to die before the lie detector could be born. In other words, the technology was available early on, but it could be put together for the task of lie detection only after the conception of the criminal as a distinct biological type of human being was replaced with the notion that we all have the potential for criminality. Bunn locates the shift around the turn to the twentieth century, on both sides of the Atlantic, in the discursive imagination of journalists, novelists, and filmmakers who reflected public anxieties, shaped the public’s imagination, and presented science with a new agenda—to uncover the hidden guilt of ordinary people. At this stage, Bunn’s social history crosses the Atlantic to the new world, where the challenge was met and the twentieth-century legend of the lie detector was born. At least three people claimed the glory for inventing the machine during the 1920s: William Marston, a lawyer-psychologist from Boston; John Larson, a police scientist from Berkeley, California; and Leonard Keeler, a poet’s son and a technical man, who was recruited to help Larson. The intense rivalry that evolved between these three characters fueled much of the early historiography of the lie detector, which has been busy arbitrating their competing claims. Ken Alder’s 2007 The Lie Detectors was the first to step away from these debates. He found the identity debate pointless; the true inventor of the lie detector, he argued, was American popular culture. Bunn agrees with Alder, but his approach is different. Alder did not shy away from the larger social questions, but he preferred to approach them obliquely, in poetic forms, which the technology evokes so well. His attempt at the history of America’s convoluted love-hate affair with the machine resulted in a dark tale about human ambition and self-deception, based on the biographies of [End Page 753] the individuals who conceived, developed, and marketed the lie detector as a technology of honesty and rationality. Bunn chooses to tackle head-on the larger questions about the society that embraced the machine and allowed it to flourish. The later chapters of...