The Lying Brain: Lie Detection in Science and Science Fiction

Notes

Notes introduction 1. The polygraph has enjoyed a long-standing alliance with U.S. government agencies (Ford 2006; Alder 2007). In his 2002 article “A Social History of Untruth : Lie Detection and Trust in Twentieth-Century America,” Ken Alder argues that the American fascination with the polygraph is not incidental. Indeed, versions of the machine emerged at a crucial time in U.S. history, just when America was beginning to cope with a mass public and “the rise of new large-scale organizations ” (2). The polygraph promised to preserve a spirit of truth and forthrightness in an era of anonymity and potentially compromised national security . In the 1940s Leonarde Keeler, inventor of the portable polygraph, convinced the federal government to use the instrument “to screen security risks,” including German POWs who were to be deployed in occupied Germany as police of‹cers (17). By the 1950s, the polygraph was being used by McCarthy’s regime to screen for communist sympathizers and homosexuals. Since then, agencies from the CIA to the FBI to local police have employed polygraphs for routine employee screening and suspect interrogation. Despite several blatant failures—as in the Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen spy cases—“the instrument is still trotted out as the gold standard in high-pro‹le criminal cases, as a way to plug security leaks, and as an instrument to extract the truth from those suspected of threatening America’s safety” (24). For more information on the Lindberg kidnapping case and its intersections with the polygraph, see Jim Fisher, The Lindberg Case (1994, 128–29, 181). 2. The ahistoricist impulse I reference here has been analyzed by scholars in several related ‹elds: Lisa Cartwright, writing in a Foucauldian vein, argues that “contemporary scienti‹c imaging [is] a ‹eld that persistently has been sealed off from its history (even as it emerges) by a veiling rhetoric of newness and discovery ” (1992, 131); I will return to just such rhetoric in chapter 5. Thomas Kuhn (1962) spoke at length about—and other scholars have taken up his call for discussions of—the historicide of scienti‹c knowledge, and the reiteration of humanistic knowledge. In a more general sense, Bruno Latour speaks in terms of the black-boxing of technologies through which the processes of scienti‹c 149 knowledge production are erased in favor of the ‹nal product (Science in Action, 1987). Finally, recent work by Robert Proctor and Londa Schiebinger has introduced a new and relevant kind of theoretical analysis: a ‹eld called agnotology, which can be de‹ned as the cultural study of ignorance. For more information on agnotology, see their edited collection by the same name (2007) and see Proctor’s Cancer Wars (1996). 3. See chapter 5 for a more complete explanation of blood oxygenation level dependent fuctional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). 4. Many of these questions are raised and/or complicated by theory of mind (ToM), a ‹eld of study that addresses how we understand other people’s consciousness —and the fact that they have consciousness at all. While a full discussion of intersections between deception and ToM is outside the scope of this book, I would point out two central connections: ‹rst, that deception research takes for granted that deceptive acts require an understanding and/or assumption of another mind that can be manipulated. And second, that lie detection research assumes that lying is strenuous—that it requires extra work in and of the body—rather than seeing lying as an evolutionarily adaptive strategy. I speci‹cally address the former in the introduction and the latter in chapters 2, 5, and the coda. For more information on ToM, reading the minds of others, and the role of language in the creation of deceptive statements, see Steve Johnson’s Emergence (2002), Robin Dunbar’s Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language (1996), Ronald Schleifer’s Intangible Materialism (2009), and George Steiner’s After Babel (1975). 5. There is some disagreement about whether lying and deception are one and the same; see Campbell (2001). While there is a case to be made for lying as a subset of deception (which can encompass a wider range of manipulated information ), I will use the terms interchangeably throughout the book. This choice is not out of step with the literature on de‹nitions of deception, the historical literature on lie detection, or the neuroscienti‹c literature on deception and its detection. 6. There is also something to be said about the relationship of ‹ction to deception...