In the first decades of the 20th century, researchers made a thrilling new claim: they could tell whether someone was lying by using a machine. Popularly known as the “lie detector,” the device transformed police work, seized headlines and was extolled in movies, TV and comics as an infallible crime-fighting tool. But the promise of the polygraph turned dark, and the lie detector too often became an apparatus of fear and intimidation.
“A challenging, eye-opening view of the potential consequences of society’s desire to fuse psychology and science.”
–The Washington Post
–The Washington Post