Facing the FACS: Paul Ekman, Facial Expressions, and Deception Detection in the Latter Half of the 20th Century

Historical Antecedents

Darwin and Lombroso: Evolutionary Theory Meets Deception Detection in the 19th Century

Efforts to construct a science of deception detection trace back to the nineteenth century, coinciding with the birth of criminology as a distinct social science field. Owing to the influence of new evolutionary theories, during this time, scientists and criminologists began to believe that they could see deception right on someone’s face. For example, Cesare Lombroso, the founder of criminology and the creator of the “born criminal” trope, leveraged recapitulationist assumptions in order to assert that criminals—apparently evolutionarily closer in their development to ferocious apes and “savages”—had physically-identifiable, atavistic “stigmata” on the face and body that were anatomical signs of their phylogenetic propensity for deception and criminality. After taking many mug shots and detailed anthropometric measurements to track the apparent presence of these stigmata, Lombroso claimed that the face was particularly useful in determining a person’s deceptive inclination. Around the same time, Charles Darwin was also interested in tying his new evolutionary theories to deception. In his Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Darwin used natural selection to establish a continuum of emotions between man and animals. Here, he naturalized emotions by arguing that natural selection produced emotions because the behaviors associated with them (e.g. facial expressions) were useful to species communication. Darwin then argued that one could study the human body as a signaling system for these underlying ancestral emotions. He was particularly interested in how the body signaled one’s internal morality, and thus, of course, deception was not exempt from this. He also became fixated on blushing, which he argued was an involuntary mechanism tied to emotional states of shame and dishonesty. Inspired by these theories, criminologists like Lombroso held that criminals showed abnormal blushing because they were innately less shameful for their dishonesty. Furthermore, given the theories establishing a continuum of emotions between humans and animals, they took the idea that criminals do not display proper emotions to be a sign of their proximity to savage ancestors; in the case of blushing, for example, that criminals did not blush signified their ties to “dishonest and savage life.”[2]

Lie Detection with, well, the Lie Detector

The deception sciences in the 19th century thus set the precedent for naturalizing emotions. After Darwin’s subsequent theories about the emotions and the recognition of the James-Lange Theory of emotions, by the early 20th century, the majority of scientists felt that there was a deep connection between one’s emotions and bodily experiences. Scientists felt that this rendered emotions measurable, which prompted scientists to introduce mechanistic and instrument-based approaches to emotions that quantified the associated bodily changes (e.g. heart rate, galvanic skin response, breathing rate). For instance, Italian psychologist Angelo Mosso developed an instrument called the plethysmograph to detect changes in blood pressure in response to certain emotional stimuli. In the years leading up to World War I, Harvard psychologist Hugo Munsterberg used a variety of these kinds of instruments in order to record and analyze subjective feelings in the lab.

These scientific practices surrounding quantifying and measuring emotional responses choreographed the perfect arena for the emergence of the polygraph (what we more commonly call the lie detector). Because deception was associated with emotional states like shame and because psychologists now believed that emotions could be objectively measured, scientists at this time became increasingly convinced that they could specifically develop a technology to tell whether someone was lying. The creation of this technology materialized across various sites in the United States and would have radical implications for varied aspects of modern life. One of Munsterberg’s students, William Moulton Marston (who also happened to be the creator of the character Wonder Woman), invented an early prototype of the lie detector with his systolic blood pressure test in 1915. Across the United States within Chief August Vollmer’s in-house science and data-driven training program for police officers in Berkeley, California, American police officer John Augustus Larson developed a machine in 1921 that gave a continuous readout of blood pressure, heart rate, and respiratory variations.

Leonarde Keeler testing his polygraph on a former witness in a 1937 trial.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonarde_Keeler

One of Larson’s assistants named Leonarde Keeler became fascinated with John Larson’s machine and enhanced it by adding a psychogalvanometer, finally patenting his design in 1939. The story of the polygraph shows how the practices of detecting deception evolved into a fully-fledged scientific field by the mid-20th century, based out of early psychological and evolutionary theories of emotions from the 19th century. When we think about deception detection today, we still tend to think about, well, the lie detector. Yet, as the polygraph became a kind of unstable (and perhaps failed) enterprise in the mid-late 20th century,[3] new technologies and techniques began to fill the void within the continued search for a true science of deception.[4]

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