Born Liars (9 page)

Carter and Weber followed their initial experiment with one intended to address that question. They made videos of students in simulated job interviews in which half of the interviewees were asked to tell the truth throughout the interview, while the other half were asked to lie about three significant things that might help them ‘get the job'. The researchers then played these tapes to participants who had previously filled out a standard psychological test designed to ascertain whether or not they were high trusters or low trusters – for our purposes, let's call them Trusters and Cynics. The participants were asked to judge which students were telling the truth and which were lying. As it turned out, the Trusters were significantly
more
likely than the Cynics to spot the liars.

This finding tallies with previous experimental evidence from other social scientists suggesting that, counter-intuitively, Trusters are less gullible than Cynics. The reason for this seems to be that people who are naturally suspicious of their fellow human beings tend to keep their social interactions to a minimum, outside of a small circle of known and trusted acquaintances. In the words of the sociologist Toshio Yamagishi, they take fewer ‘social risks'. This means they are less experienced at dealing with other people – at least, people they don't already know well – and therefore at reading intentions and motivations.

If you assume everyone you meet is out to deceive you, then you're less likely to be duped, but you're also less likely to learn how to distinguish liars from truth-tellers. Trusters come to be seen as gullible because they are the ones who most often enter into risky social interactions that occasionally backfire – the ones who go on blind dates or buy antiques from market stalls. But they're not gullible; they're trusting. There is a difference.

In January 2007, a retired police inspector called Garry Weddell strangled his wife Sandra, a nurse, at their home in Bedfordshire, a few weeks after she had confessed to an affair and asked him for a divorce. Then he tied a length of cable around her neck and hung her body in the garage to make it look as if she had killed herself. Near the body he placed a single sheet of A4 paper on which he had typed her ‘suicide note', wearing rubber gloves to avoid leaving any fingerprints. Weddell had spent twenty-five years on the force and had an idea of what his former colleagues would be looking for.

Few people who knew the Weddells could believe that Sandra, a seemingly happy mother of three, would kill herself, and although Garry Weddell was not initially considered a suspect, a few of the more experienced detectives had their suspicions. They checked with police forces across the country and found only three previous deaths involving cable ties – every one a murder. Furthermore, there were bruises on Sandra's body that suggested she might have been in a fight before she died. The suicide note became a key piece of evidence: was it authentic?

Police handed the note to John Olsson, an expert in the field of forensic linguistics. In 1994 Olsson had been a post-graduate linguist working at the University of Birmingham, where he first became interested in the application of his work to criminal investigations. His colleague Malcom Coulthard had performed an analysis of the written confession of Derek Bentley – hanged in 1953 for the murder of a policeman – which demonstrated that it had almost certainly been written by a policeman, helping to win a posthumous pardon for Bentley. Olsson was hooked, and by the time of the Weddell investigation he had worked with the police on over three hundred cases, from extortion to murder.

In Olsson's experience, forged suicide notes could be spotted by their overuse of highly charged, self-lacerating words like crazy, cowardly, and selfish, which are rarely found in the genuine article. According to this logic, Sandra's note looked like it might be authentic because it didn't use such language, but Weddell was an experienced cop who might have had a strong sense of which sentiments would ring true. So Olsson began looking for other clues. In previous cases, idiosyncrasies of spelling often pointed to the real author of the note, but he couldn't find any of those in the note or in letters written by Sandra or her husband. He had to get down to the level of punctuation before he made a breakthrough.

Olsson noticed something about the length of sentences in the note – in particular a quirk in the placing of full stops, the first of which appeared immediately after Sandra had supposedly written her husband's name:

Garry. I am typing this note, because I know that if I were to hand write it and leave it for you, then I know that you wouldn't read it. I am so sorry for all the hurt I have caused you Garry. I never meant to hurt you or cause you so much pain.

The note was brief, to the point and peppered with full stops, most notably the first one. It was very unlike the letters known to have been written by Sandra, who favoured long rambling sentences, sprinkled with commas, dashes and semi-colons. One of her past sentences was more than one hundred and thirty words long – compared to the average sentence length of only twelve words in the suicide note. Much closer to the style of what was allegedly her final letter were letters written by her husband, who used full stops liberally and whose sentences averaged only nine words. This, together with other evidence, led the police to charge Weddell with murder.
³

The kind of lying I focus on in this book is face-to-face, human-to-human deceit, in which the deceiver is attempting to spin a story that accords with his or her personality and circumstances. The more the lie is identified with the liar, the better. There is, however, another category of deception altogether, one in which the deceiver creates something – a painting, a recording, a document – that they hope will never be traced back to them.

Weddell's ‘suicide note' is an example of such ‘remote deception'. My second and final example of it comes from a different field of forensic investigation. The study of ‘election forensics' took off after the disputed American presidential election of 2000. It applies statistical analysis to election results as a way of detecting fraud.

Faking election results doesn't sound difficult. You just invent a string of random numbers that are plausible enough and show the result you want, right? But it's harder than you might imagine. The problem is that we're surprisingly bad at making up random numbers. When participants in lab experiments are asked to write sequences of random digits, they tend to select some digits, or some patterns of digits, more frequently than others. The job of electoral forensics experts is to analyse the results of elections to see if they're really as random as they ought to be, or if there are some suspicious consistencies that reveal the hand of a fixer.

Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco, political scientists from the University of Columbia, analysed the disputed 2009 Iranian election that led to Iran's Green movement. They looked at the published vote counts received by different candidates in different provinces, concentrating on the last and second-to-last digits of each number. For example, if a candidate received 14,579 votes in a province, they focused on digits 7 and 9. The last digits in a fair election don't tell us anything about the candidates, the make-up of the electorate or the context of the election. They are what statisticians call random noise. But that's the point: it means they can serve as a litmus test for election fraud. For example, an election in which a majority of the vote counts ended in 5 would be very suspicious.

When Beber and Sacco looked at the results issued by Iran's Ministry of the Interior they found some odd anomalies. The number 7 appeared far more often than it would normally do in a set of randomly generated figures, and the number 5 far less often. Fewer than four in a hundred non-fraudulent elections would produce such numbers. That wasn't all. It's also been found that people have trouble generating non-adjacent digits (such as 64 or 17, as opposed to twenty-three) as frequently as one would expect in a sequence of random numbers. To check for deviations of this type, Berber and Sacco examined the pairs of last and second-to-last digits in Iran's vote counts. On average, if the results had not been manipulated, seventy per cent of these pairs should have consisted of distinct, non-adjacent digits. In this case, only sixty-two per cent of the pairs contained non-adjacent digits. That may not sound so different from seventy per cent, but the probability that a fair election would produce a difference this large is less than 4.2 per cent.

Each of the two tests provided strong evidence that Iran's published vote counts had been manipulated. Taken together, they left little room for reasonable doubt. According to this analysis, the chance that the Iranian election was fair is less than one in two hundred.

The past, present and future of lie detectors

On 19 April 1921, in Berkeley, California, a young policeman invited an eighteen-year-old woman called Margaret Taylor into a small room. A strange-looking contraption sat on the table. Taylor, a blue-eyed, golden-haired native of the state, wasn't sure what to expect. A few weeks previously she had reported the theft of a four hundred-dollar ring from her room in College Hall, the female boarding house of her university campus. Now she was being asked to recount her story whilst attached to this bizarre device which – it was rumoured – could read her mind. Taylor wasn't the only girl in College Hall to find something had gone missing recently. For several months now its inhabitants – most of them young ladies from well-to-do families – had been returning to their rooms to find their evening gowns spread out on their beds, as if someone had been sizing them up. A sophomore from Bakersfield had been robbed of forty-five dollars she had placed inside a textbook; other students had lost letters, jewellery, items of silk underwear. Unable to extract a confession from any of her boarders, College Hall's housemother turned to the police. After an initial inconclusive investigation, the case was handed over to John Larson, the man who now greeted Margaret Taylor.

Miss Taylor was not under suspicion, but Larson needed a ‘control' to measure against his suspects. As several other students waited their turn outside, Larson strapped a blood-pressure gauge to one of Miss Taylor's bare arms until it gripped firmly, and wound a rubber hose tightly around her chest to measure the depth of her breathing. He told her to hold as still as she could – the least muscular movement might be mistaken for a guilty reaction. Then he turned on the instruments. Drums revolved, black recording paper turned, and the long rubber hoses swelled and subsided to the rhythms of Taylor's body. A pair of needles began to scratch out patterns on the paper. After a short preamble, Larson began his questions, speaking in a monotone:

1. Do you like college?

2. Are you interested in this test?

3. How much is 30 x 40?

4. Are you frightened?

5. Will you graduate this year?

6. Do you dance?

7. Are you interested in math?

8. Did you steal the money?

9. The test shows you stole it. Did you spend it?

The interview took six minutes. After Larson had finished with Taylor, he worked his way through the list of suspects. One of them, a student nurse called Helen Graham, entered the room already under suspicion. A few years older than the other students, Graham was a tall, striking woman with deep-set eyes and an intense manner. She was unpopular with her dorm sisters, who disdained her modest Kansas background; it had been suggested to police that she seemed to spend beyond her means. Sure enough, no sooner had Larson reached the questions about theft – ‘The tests show you stole it. Did you spend it?' – than the machine showed a steep drop in Graham's blood pressure followed by an alarming rise. In a fit of rage, Graham ripped off the machine's cuffs, leapt to her feet and ran from the room. Called back for questioning the next day, she broke down and confessed to the crime. Berkeley's newspapers hailed the first success of the police's new ‘lie detector'.

In 1858 the French physiologist Etienne-Jules Marey built a device that simultaneously recorded changes in blood pressure, respiration and pulse rates whilst his subjects were subjected to nausea, sharp noises and stress. In 1895 the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso invented an early lie detector, based on a similar physiology of emotion. A suspect was told to put his hand into a tank filled with water; his pulse would cause the level of liquid to rise and fall slightly; the greater the fluctuation, the more dishonest he was judged to be. The work of Marey and Lombroso was part of a new strain of scientific thinking about the relationship between the emotions and the nervous system. William James argued that feelings derive from physiological responses rather than vice versa; a man runs from a bear not because he feels afraid, but feels afraid because he's running from a bear. In 1901, Freud wrote that ‘No mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.' Of course, when a person's emotions are manifested in the body's starts and shivers, they become available for measurement.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, new tests of personality and intelligence promised to bring clarity and objectivity to the messy business of human character and behaviour. Hopes for a ‘truth-compelling machine' formed part of America's burgeoning optimism about the potential of such science to transform society. A 1911 article in the
New York Times
predicted a future in which ‘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.'

The cradle of this optimism was Berkeley, California, a young town formed around a new public university – the University of California – intended by its founders to outshine the old colleges back East. The trustees hoped that the campus they created, surrounded by the Contra Costa hills and commanding sublime views of the ocean, would become known as ‘the Athens of the Pacific', and by the early twentieth century Berkeley was approaching the fulfilment of this dream. The town had become a magnet for America's best students, intellectuals and artists, and renowned for its early embrace of new technologies like the telephone and the streetcar.

Berkeley's police department was making a name for itself as the most progressive in the country, under the visionary leadership of August Vollmer, today regarded as the father of modern American law enforcement. A tall, ramrod-backed man with steely blue eyes and a fierce intellectual curiosity, Vollmer believed passionately in the potential of technology to revolutionise policing. One of his goals was to substitute humane scientific techniques for the traditional third-degree interrogations meted out by police forces around the country. As Berkeley police chief, he recruited clever, scientifically educated men who wouldn't normally consider a career in law enforcement, and encouraged them to innovate. One of his first recruits was John Larson.

Studious, intense, self-questioning and a terrible shot, Larson made for an unlikely policeman. He had moved to Berkeley to study for a PhD in physiology and forensic science after writing his Master's thesis on the cutting-edge technique of fingerprint identification. Larson deeply admired Vollmer and shared his vision of a more civilised and efficient method of policing. In 1920, he became the first man in the country to be in simultaneous possession of a police badge and a doctorate.

A few weeks before the interview with Margaret Taylor, Larson had read an article by a Harvard student named William Moulton Marston. The paper was entitled ‘Physiological Possibilities of the Deception Test', and it proposed a correlation between a subject's blood pressure and the likelihood they were telling the truth. Excited by the potential of this discovery for police work, Larson, advised by Marston, used the research as a basis for the design and construction of an unwieldy device he called the cardio-pneumo-psychograph. The case of the College Hall thefts was the first time he had been able to use it for real. Apparently, it worked:
Science Nabs Sorority Sneak
, read one of the local paper's headlines, after Helen Graham's arrest. Larson was flushed with success.
⁴
A delighted August Vollmer gave the go-ahead for further work on the machine. He also landed Larson with a collaborator.

Leonarde Keeler was born in 1903 to the poet, naturalist and free-thinking bohemian Charles Keeler, who named his son in homage to Leonardo Da Vinci. A confident, technically gifted young man and an accomplished amateur magician, Leonarde had little patience for formal education. He was barely out of school when he read in the Berkeley press that the police were using something called a lie detector, and found himself gripped by the idea. Vollmer, a friend of Charles, appointed young Keeler to the force at Charles's suggestion, encouraging Larson to collaborate with this bright young man on the machine. The partnership proved fruitful. Keeler increased the number of physical signs that the lie detector monitored and made the device smaller, so that it could fit into a box. The new portable machine recorded pulse rate, blood pressure, respiration, and ‘electrodermal response' (palm sweat) on a series of graphs. Today's polygraph (named by Keeler) is much the same device.

Between 1921 and 1923 in Berkeley, Larson and Keeler tested 861 subjects in 313 cases, identifying 218 criminal suspects and exonerating 310. Most of the crimes were petty, and some were domestic, like the marital dispute of which Larson noted ‘Mrs Simons accused of masturbation by her husband.' Above all, the lie detector proved to be good at eliciting instantaneous confessions. The mysterious machine shone a spotlight on the guilty consciences of a whole community. A restaurant chef pleaded guilty to stealing silverware, a custodian of the Unitarian Church admitted to pocketing a purse and watch. Though these successes were slight, the polygraph had shown itself highly effective across a range of different circumstances, and it promised much more. Vollmer's dream of a cleaner, more efficient interrogation method seemed on the verge of materialising. Before long the nation's police chiefs were making their way to Berkeley to see this machine for themselves.

Just as his invention was growing famous, however, Larson was becoming uncertain of it. He found that when he re-tested suspects after confession, their records appeared similar to those deemed innocent of the crime. He engaged in an exchange of agonised letters with Helen Graham, who had returned to Kansas following her humiliation in Berkeley. Graham, a naturally anxious soul who suffered a deeply unstable childhood, protested her innocence to Larson, who came to believe her and apologised for what had happened. (The thefts at College Hall continued, unreported.) Larson was increasingly troubled by his concerns over what, exactly, the polygraph was measuring. But to his colleagues and peers,
how
this machine worked was less important than that it did.

The collaboration between Larson and Keeler, although fertile, was always uneasy, and over the years they became rancorous enemies. Each fought for his own vision of the machine's future, and competed for the approval of Vollmer. The more reflective and sceptical Larson saw the machine as an aid to scientific research and penal reform, but grew doubtful that it should be used to dispense justice. Keeler had no such uncertainties. He volunteered to solve celebrated crimes and basked in the ensuing publicity, which in turn helped him to sell his lie-detecting expertise to large corporations. Larson came to despise Keeler as a mere salesman who had prostituted the technology they had created together. As Keeler prospered, he was dogged at every step by his former colleague, who publicly denounced Keeler's claims for the polygraph.

Larson and Keeler remained obsessed by the machine, and by each other, for the rest of their lives. Keeler's heavy drinking led to the end of his marriage to Katherine Keeler, a glamorous and accomplished woman who trained as a forensic scientist before establishing her own all-female detective agency in Chicago. Soon after doing so she left Keeler for Rene Dussaq, a Cuban-American with a degree in philosophy from the University of Geneva who at various times was a matador, polo player, Davis Cup tennis player, fencing champion and highly decorated war hero. Katherine was killed in 1944 after the plane she was flying solo across country crashed into a field in Ohio. Keeler died of a stroke caused by alcoholism four years later, aged 46. John Larson spent the rest of his career working for various penal institutions, collecting newspaper clippings about his machine, and working on a nine thousand-page book on psychology for which he never found a publisher. He died in 1965, aged 73.

* * *

In 1986, the American spy Aldrich Ames was notified by his bosses at the CIA that he was to take a routine polygraph test. All CIA employees were expected to take the test every five years, but due to an administrative backlog Ames hadn't taken one in a decade. He remembered hating it the first time, but now he was terrified. The year before, having spent himself bankrupt, he had started selling information to the Soviets. Fearing the machine would reveal his betrayal, he passed a note to the KGB via his handlers, asking for advice on how to deal with it.

When he received a note back shortly before the test he opened it excitedly, expecting to read of a diabolically clever technique for outwitting the polygraph. Well-known counter-measures included using mental imagery to calm yourself and biting your tongue to make yourself seem anxious in response to the control questions. In fact, the KGB's advice was to get a good night's sleep, and try to relax in the interview. Ames was disappointed. Nevertheless, he did as they suggested, and passed the test with flying colours. In 1991 he passed it again, even as the CIA was carrying out an internal hunt for its mole.

Aldrich Ames – whose treachery was discovered in 1994, after he had betrayed the identities of most of the US spies in the Soviet Union, several of whom were executed – retained a lifelong contempt for the polygraph. In 2000, the scientist Steven Aftergood wrote a critical piece about the technology for the journal
Science
. That November he received a letter, handwritten across four pages, from Allenwood Federal Penitentiary, where Ames was (and is) incarcerated. In it, Ames congratulated Aftergood on his piece and delivered a witty, scathing critique of the machine, all the more authoritative for coming from one who had seen it off:

Like most junk science that just won't die (graphology, astrology and homeopathy come to mind), because of the usefulness or profit their practitioners enjoy, the polygraph stays with us. Its most obvious use is as a coercive aid to interrogators, lying somewhere on the scale between the rubber truncheon and the diploma on the wall behind the interrogator's desk. It depends upon the overall coerciveness of the setting — you'll be fired, you won't get the job, you'll be prosecuted, you'll go to prison — and the credulous fear the device inspires.