Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

FBI File of Lie Detector's Creator

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the lasso-of-truth dept.

George Maschke writes, "It appears that the FBI considered William Moulton Marston (1893-1947), who invented the lie detector and created the comic book character Wonder Woman under the pseudonym Charles Moulton, to be a 'phony' and a 'crackpot.' He is alleged to have misrepresented the result of a study he conducted for the Gillette razor company in 1938, for which he reportedly received some $30,000, a handsome sum in those days. Despite these misgivings, the FBI today uses Marston's creation (the polygraph, not the Lasso of Truth) to guide investigations as well as to screen applicants and employees. You can download Marston's FBI file here (736 KB PDF)."

3 of 181 comments (clear)

  1. Re:A way out? by CoverStory · · Score: 5, Interesting
    As shown recently on MythBusters, Cleve Backster the man that originated the comparison test used by most law enforcement agencies to determine the results of a polygraph test spent most of his career using those tests on plants.

    From any interview given in 1997
    ... the imagery entered my mind of burning the leaf I was testing. I didn't verbalize, I didn't touch the plant, I didn't touch the equipment. The only new thing that could have been a stimulus for the plant was the mental image. Yet the plant went wild. The pen jumped right off the top of the chart.

    If that won't convince someone about the accuracy of the test, I don't think TFA will.
  2. Bondage by Harmonious+Botch · · Score: 3, Interesting

    He wasn't so interested in lie detection, he just liked tying people up. A lie detector that didn't require strapping things on people wouldn't interest him. Look at what happened to so many women in the WW comics.

  3. What if a high false positive rate doesn't matter? by dircha · · Score: 4, Interesting

    According to the studies linked from the Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygraph) it seems that while the test has a high false positive rate, the false negative rate is lower than one would expect of random chance. Does anyone read it otherwise?

    While I think it would be abhorrent to allow such a device to be used against a defendant in our criminal justice system, it the above is true it doesn't seem to me so unreasonable at all that it be used in the hiring of FBI and CIA agents and the like.

    A better chance of keeping Russian and Chinese spies out of our security forces may very well outweigh turning away candidates incorrectly classified as deceitful.

    Whereas in matters of criminal justice most seem to agree it is better that 10 guilty men should go free than that 1 innocent man should be condemned.

    Also, I've always wondered whether this isn't really more of a "nervousness test" than anything else.