Something You Should Know - Science You Believe That Isn't True & The Story of The Lie Detector - SYSK Choice
Episode Date: March 15, 2025This may be hard to imagine but trees can fight crime. Not all types of crime but they the fight some crime – and no one really knows how they do it. Listen to hear the explanation. https://www.mot...herjones.com/environment/2019/04/trees-crime-cincinnati-philadelphia-ida-b-wells-chicago/ People believe things like goldfish have a 3-second memory. Or that lightning never strikes twice in the same place. And I bet you believe that water is a good conductor of electricity. None of these things are true. They are examples of the many science myths that a lot of people believe. In this episode, we are going to debunk these and others with my guest, science writer Brian Clegg. Brian is the author of over 40 books, one of which is titled Lightning Often Strikes Twice: The 50 Biggest Misconceptions in Science (https://amzn.to/41sY3jK) I’m sure you’ve seen a polygraph machine in movies or on TV. This device can supposedly tell if someone is lying. But does it actually work? If it is so reliable, why do most courts refuse to allow the results of polygraph tests as evidence? Yet, if it is unreliable, why is it still being used? The story of the polygraph or lie detector is fascinating. Here to tell it is Amit Katwala an award winning journalist, a senior writer at Wired and author of the book Tremors in the Blood: Murder, Obsession, and the Birth of the Lie Detector (https://amzn.to/3Zngu7C) Are men better drivers than women? It really depends on your definition of “better.” However, in terms of accidents, moving violations and parking ability, there is a difference between men and women. Listen and I’ll reveal which gender scores better. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/27/well/live/car-accidents-deaths-men-women.html PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! FACTOR: Eat smart with Factor! Get 50% off at https://FactorMeals.com/something50off QUINCE: Indulge in affordable luxury! Go to https://Quince.com/sysk for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. TIMELINE: Get 10% off your order of Mitopure! Go to https://Timeline.com/SOMETHING SHOPIFY: Nobody does selling better than Shopify! Sign up for a $1 per-month trial period at https://Shopify.com/sysk and upgrade your selling today! HERS: Hers is changing women's healthcare by providing access to GLP-1 weekly injections with the same active ingredient as Ozempic and Wegovy, as well as oral medication kits. Start your free online visit today at https://forhers.com/sysk INDEED: Get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING right now! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Today on Something You Should Know, how is it that trees fight crime?
Then science myths that many people believe, like sugar makes kids hyper, water is a good
conductor of electricity, and lightning never strikes the same place twice.
The classic is the Empire State Building.
It's typically struck, I think, about 25 times a year.
In fact, there's even one guy, there was a US park ranger called Roy Sullivan who's been struck by lightning
seven times in his career, thankfully, is survivable.
Also are men better drivers than women? And the polygraph, or lie detector, where did
it come from? How does it work? And does it work?
Essentially the reason the polygraph has been so successful is because of the theater around it, right?
It works because people believe it works so that the mere threat of being attached to a polygraph
can compel someone to confess to the crime before the exam even takes place.
All this today on Something You Should Know.
Want to own part of the airline you flew with on your last vacation?
Or part of the company that makes your favorite triple shot latte with extra foam?
What about owning part of a company that one day could send you on a tour of outer space?
Now you can.
With Partial Shares from TD Direct Investing, you can own part of your favorite companies.
Just pick a stock and decide how much to spend on the share.
It's a piece of cake. Learn more at td.com slash partial shares.
TD, ready for you.
Something you should know. Fascinating Intel, the world's top experts and practical advice
you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, welcome and thank you for joining me for another episode of Something You Should Know.
And we're going to start today talking about trees.
If you live in a neighborhood that has a lot of nice big trees, it's a little safer than
neighborhoods without them.
According to the U.S. Forest Service, less crime occurs
in neighborhoods with big trees in the front yards and along the street.
So what exactly makes having trees a deterrent to crime? For the most part, it's an unexplained
phenomenon, but researchers have come up with a few ideas. Some say trees signal that the
area is well cared for, similar to the broken
windows theory which suggests that disorder invites crime. Some say green spaces make
an area inviting and can lead to more informal surveillance. Other theories point to the
well-documented calming effect of vegetation and nature, or that the idea that greenery promotes
trust in the community. Whatever the reason, trees fight crime and that is
something you should know. I'm sure you've heard statements, scientific-y
kind of statements like lightning never strikes the same place twice or your
blood is red because of the iron in it or that the Big Bang Theory explains
the beginning of the universe but these are actually examples of statements that
are not true and there are a lot of them things that you may believe that just
aren't so and here to reveal several of them and explain that you may believe that just aren't so. And here to reveal
several of them and explain why they're not true is Brian Clegg. Brian is a
science writer and speaker who has written over 40 science books. One of them
is called Lightning Often Strikes Twice, the 50 Biggest Misconceptions in Science.
Hi Brian, welcome to Something You Should Know. Thanks for having me. So what made you decide to tackle this, to try to explain
that a lot of things that we perhaps believe about science are in fact not true?
I spent a lot of time talking to people about science and all too often
what comes up is it's a bit more complicated than we thought, that science tends to be a little more
complicated than we think about it. And what I'm looking at here in a fairly light way, a fairly fun way,
is areas where we think that science is different from the way it really is, or where we simplify it so much
that actually we don't really understand what's happening. So it's just trying to open up a little bit. It might be urban myths, it might be folklore, or it might just be
not quite getting the science right in what I hope is an enjoyable way.
Well, let's get specific. And one that you talk about that I have always believed is
that water is a very good conductor of electricity. And you know,
you see in the movies, somebody throws a toaster that's plugged in into a bathtub to kill somebody
or you know, to me, I've always thought water was a very good conductor of electricity.
And it seems crazy to say water doesn't conduct electricity, but actually it's
really bad conductor of electricity. But what is happening is it's the impurities in the water that enable it to do
that conducting. So if you take totally pure water it's a really bad conductor. And sometimes
there's little things like that or for that matter toast. Toast falling butter side down.
You know this thing you drop a slice of toast it falls on the floor it's always falling butter side down. You know this thing, you drop a slice of toast, it falls on the floor.
It's always the butter side that hits the floor.
Or is it?
Can that really be true?
And a number of TV shows have actually tried
to demonstrate it's not true.
But unfortunately, what they've tended to do
is toss toast in the air, a bit like tossing a coin.
But the reality is, when you drop a slice of toast,
you don't throw it up in the air like a coin. It slides off your plate or it slides off the work surface. And they're just
about the right height that when something slides off and starts to turn, it has enough
time to turn half a turn. So the butter side's gone down, but not enough time to go all the
way. So it genuinely is true that even though lots of people think
sure they can't really be true that toast always falls but aside down it
pretty much always does. Well let's go back to the water one because you know
you're told not to stand in water when you're holding something electric
because the water will that there's something about standing in water that
that's gonna kill you so something's got to be there other than just the impurities.
No?
No, absolutely not.
Literally pure water, H2O, is a bad conductor.
It's a good insulator.
But the fact is, almost all the water
we deal with on a day-to-day basis,
the water that comes out of the faucets in the bathroom,
is water that has minerals in it.
And that's a good thing, you know, on the whole,
there's nothing wrong with that, it's not a problem.
But these minerals are in the form of what are called ions,
so they're basically positively or electrically charged,
negatively electrically charged.
And that means that they can carry an electrical current.
And it's those impurities in the water that actually carry
the current.
And it is dangerous, of course.
Yes, you don't want to play around
with electrics when you're in contact with water,
because on the whole, the water we experience isn't pure.
So since it's the title of your book,
does lightning strike twice?
Yep, it certainly does.
I think one of the reasons for this
is lightning is probably the most dramatic natural occurrence
that most people have experienced.
There are bigger things out there,
more horrific things like earthquakes and so forth.
But the fact is most people have experienced lightning.
It's pretty frightening stuff if it's fairly close.
And if you ever see an actual lightning strike
or it hits a tree or something like that,
it's very dramatic. And certainly, you know, over the centuries, most people
would not have seen lightning striking the same place twice. And because of that, a kind
of folklore built up around it. But the fact is, it does happen and it happens a lot. You
know, any one time around the world, there may be 20,000 lightning storms, thunderstorms
happening, and somewhere where there's a nice big pointy thing, you will get more than one strike.
So the classic is the Empire State Building. It's typically struck, I think, about 25 times a year,
and it has been struck as many as 15 times just in a single storm. The fact is lightning really does strike more than once on the same location, but
this kind of, it's almost become a, you know, a way of referring to something. So we don't
necessarily literally mean lightning does strike twice, but rather more metaphorically, it's not
likely to happen. In fact, there's even one guy, there was a US park ranger called Roy Sullivan,
who's been struck by lightning seven times in his career,
thankfully, survived them all.
He's either really lucky or really unlucky.
I mean, just in terms of the odds, that seems like he must
have to be trying to be struck by lightning because nobody can,
that just seems impossible. I'm not sure he's still with us but when he was around, I'm not surprised
he was the kind of job he was doing. He was out there, out in the wilds a lot, out in places where
you may possibly get struck by lightning more than most of us are.
One of the fun ones, because I've always
wondered how you would ever know this,
is that a goldfish has a three-second memory.
How would you ever test that in the first place?
Anybody who actually owns fish, particularly if you have a pond,
knows instinctively almost that this isn't right.
Because the fact is, goldfish
learn for instance, that if you come to the edge of a pond in a particular place, holding
something and sort of shaking it around, food's coming and they come to you, they remember
it, they do have a memory. But in science, scientific terms, it's been tested by training
them for instance to go through mazes and they remember how to do that.
In fact, all the evidence is that the original
three-second memory bit came from a commercial,
an advertisement that was done,
just humorously referring to this,
and somehow it's become part of what we tend to believe.
And it's handy for a joke. It's you know, but it's not really something
Of all the things you talk about it if any one of them has crept into
Conventional wisdom more than any other is the idea that sugar makes kids hyper. I mean so many people
Believe that because it's their experience that they see it. Kids have sugar and they seem to get hyper.
So how can that not be true?
It's a problem that you get in a lot of scientific experiments,
actually, not just the anecdotes.
Because if somebody is just reporting, say, how they feel
or what's happened, we can't actually
isolate what the cause is.
Now, what you actually find in practice is that when people have said, oh, yeah,
the kids have got really excited, they've had lots of sugar.
There is often some other thing going on at the same time.
So, you know, take children to a party.
Yeah, they get lots of sugar.
They get really excited, but also they're in a party. So is it really surprising that they're getting excited? That just is no good
scientific evidence. When you treat it scientifically, which means you have to separate off all the
different influences, put people in a controlled situation so that you can actually separate
off what is causing something, there is no good evidence that consumption of sugar
actually makes them hyper.
You claim that the Big Bang Theory does not
explain the beginning of the universe,
but I thought that's exactly what it did explain.
So sort that out for me.
That's quite a nice little example of the,
it's a bit more complicated than that.
The Big Bang Theory is a theory of how the universe grew from practically nothing all
the way up to what we have today.
And we think that has taken about 13.8 billion years for it to go from a very tiny, practically
nothing up to what we have now. And the Big Bang Theory is very successful at explaining that,
but we tend to associate it with literally the beginning of everything.
And that's the one thing the Big Bang Theory doesn't do for us.
It doesn't actually explain why or how the universe came into being initially.
That very first start, it has to already have, if you like, the laws of physics have to be there already. It doesn't explain where they come from. And the actual initial start of the whole thing requires, if you like, it to be there already for it to then start expanding. So it's not quite made it. And the other thing about it is we have a problem just seeing back that far. Now, the universe is really quite generous to us because light takes a long
time to get to us from very distant places.
So the further out you look in the universe, the further back you see in time.
And we can see back until maybe 300, 400,000 years after the beginning.
But beyond that, we can't see because the universe wasn't transparent before then. Light couldn't get through it. So what that does
mean is that those first years, we struggled a little bit to be sure exactly what happened
then. And certainly the Big Bang doesn't give any insights of the initial beginning. So
it's just a slight tweak, if you like.
It's a great theory. It explains a lot. It gives us a timescale for the universe. But what it doesn't
do is say how the universe came into being. We're talking about science myths, things that a lot of
people believe that just don't happen to be true. My guest is Brian Clegg. He is author of the book, Lightning Often Strikes Twice,
the 50 Biggest Misconceptions in Science.
I'm Amy Nicholson, the film critic for the LA Times.
And I'm Paul Scheer, an actor, writer, and director.
You might know me from the league, VEEP,
or my non eligible for Academy Award role in Twisters.
We come together to host Unspool,
the podcast where we talk about good movies, critical hits,
fan favorites, must-sees, and in case you missed them.
We're talking Parasite the Home Alone.
From Grease to the Dark Knight.
So if you love movies like we do,
come along on our cinematic adventure.
Listen to Unspooled wherever you get your podcasts.
And don't forget to hit the follow button.
For a long time now,
I've been recommending The Jordan Harbinger Show as another podcast
you might want to listen to.
The Jordan Harbinger Show is different than something you should know, but as you'll see,
it aligns well with this audience.
Meaning, if you like this podcast, you're probably going to like that one.
The Jordan Harbinger Show.
Each episode is a conversation with a different,
fascinating guest. Recently he had on Amanda Ripley talking about how to survive an unthinkable
disaster, which strikes close to home for me having just been through the fires and mudslides
in California and evacuated twice. He also spoke with Jay Dobbins, who's a former ATF agent who went undercover with
the Hells Angels. Now that's a conversation worth hearing. And listening to his conversations
will make you a more critical thinker about the world around you. Check out The Jordan
Harbinger Show and there's a good chance it finds its way into your regular rotation of podcasts.
The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts,
Spotify or wherever you listen. So Brian, what about blood? People say that the reason your blood
is red is because it has iron in it and iron makes it give it that red color, but you say that's not true. Blood is red because of hemoglobin, so the substance in the stuff that carries the oxygen
around the body. And that hemoglobin does contain iron. And so it's quite easy to get a little bit
confused and think, okay, well, iron usually makes things reddish, you know, so rust is iron oxide.
usually makes things reddish, so rust is iron oxide, it's an iron compound. Mars looks red because there's a lot of iron in the surface, so we tend to associate iron and redness.
But as it happens, the reason hemoglobin is red is actually due to the shape of the molecule,
the way it interacts with light. It's nothing to do with the fact the ions in there. So that's one aspect of it is not actually caused by the ion. And the
other thing is the blue blood thing is not about the color of the blood itself. It's
about the way that light interacts with your veins. It's quite separate from the color
of the blood in them. Colour is quite interesting.
Sometimes it's caused by a pigment, so sometimes it's caused by the colour of stuff, but sometimes
it's structural. So actually the shape of something can change the appearance or the
way light interacts with molecules. If you look up at the sky, the sky is blue, but there's
no blue pigment in the
sky.
There's nothing up there that is blue.
It's literally the way the light is interacting with the molecules of air.
And similarly, when you see the blue veins in your arm, it's not that the blood in them
is blue.
It's the way the light interacts with the material that makes up the veins.
Something I've heard that I think a lot of people have heard this in one form or another,
that you can't explain how a bee flies, that a bee flies in defiance of the laws of physics.
It's just impossible to explain. It's a mystery. And you say it's not a mystery.
The reality is that bumblebees don't fly the way you might think.
So if you think of a bird flapping its wings,
it's fairly obvious what's happening.
It's flapping its wings up and down.
That pushes the air down, effectively pushes the bird up
as it pushes the air down.
Bumblebee's wings move in a much more complicated way.
They basically almost act a bit like a
helicopter in that they have a kind of curved motion. And the result of that is they actually
generate more lift than you would expect from those little wings. The other thing about
bumblebees actually is they look chunky, you know, compared with an ordinary insect, they look pretty
fat, but actually they're still very light, so it isn't as dramatic looking,
as dramatic as it actually looks to be. And the fact is there's no problem at all with bumblebee
wings supporting bumblebees. In some ways a more interesting example is kangaroos,
because it is genuinely genuinely true that kangaroos use more energy or appear to use more energy
when they bounce along than they consume. They seem to be able to actually give out
more energy in their bounces than they have consumed in their food. And the reason for
that is it's a bit like the way a rubber ball works. If you drop a rubber ball on the floor,
it bounces. When I was young, they had these things called super balls, super balls that bounced
really high. I don't know if you ever had one of those. And kangaroos are a bit like that.
So when they hit the ground, it's not a case of all the energy they're putting into their muscles
It's not a case of all the energy they're putting into their muscles is wasted. It's actually more like storing up energy in a rubber band as they hit the ground and
then it bounces off and they use up that extra energy they've stored away.
So they can do what seem to be amazing things even though in practice they're not breaking
the laws of physics.
You say that it's a false statement to make that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light,
but I've always heard that the speed of light is the absolute limit anything can travel,
so I'd like to hear that explanation.
It's another of those little... it's a little bit more complicated.
We're oversimplifying when we say the speed of light is the limit.
The real thing is the speed of light in a vacuum is the limit.
So the fastest anything can go is the speed that light goes through empty space.
But light can also go through other stuff.
It can go through water, it can go through glass,
and when it does, it slows down. So light goes considerably slower through water or through glass
or another solid transparent substance. And when it does that, it slows down sufficiently that
physical objects can move faster than the speed
the light's going. And there's something called Cherenkov radiation that happens in nuclear
reactors. If you've ever seen a video of one of the old nuclear reactors that had water surrounding
the nuclear pile, it glows blue. And the reason it's gluing blue is that little particles
that are coming off out of the
nuclear reactor are actually
going faster through the water than the speed
of light through the water.
And that produces a kind of
optical equivalent of a sonic boom
which produces this blue glow.
So yes, it's true.
The speed of light in a vacuum
is the absolute limit. But if's true. The speed of light in a vacuum is the absolute limit.
But if we just say the speed of light is as fast as you can go, it's not true if you're
not in a vacuum.
I remember this one that supposedly there were subliminal messages in movies, like just
a still frame of a drink or a snack or something that didn't register consciously
with you, but would make you want to go to the lobby and buy a drink or some popcorn
or something.
And I remember people talked about that.
The fascinating thing about this one is it was, if you like, a deliberate urban myth.
So a guy who is in advertising and marketing produced a fake paper effectively
saying that this was the case. And he used this to try to sell the idea that these subliminal
messages would make people want to drink more of a particular beverage or want to go out and have
a hot dog or whatever. And the fact is, it just wasn't true. There is no good evidence that these subliminal messages work. But the fact is, so many people
have heard this, that we still today, in a number of countries for instance, it's illegal to use
subliminal messaging. Interestingly, there are very subtle effects that do seem to happen as a result
of it. But what certainly isn't true is that it will subtly turn people, you know,
into the urge to drink a particular drink or eat a particular substance. Well, but there's two questions here. There's does it work, which apparently doesn't work very well,
but also did it happen? Did, were people putting frames that you could not consciously see
in the movie to try to make it work?
Certainly in the original, no.
So it was totally fictional.
It was made up, the original that was written up.
It never did happen then.
Since then, people have tried it,
either tried it as experiment to see whether or not it works,
but also some people have tried to influence others
by putting frames in this way.
But as I say, all the scientific evidence is that it has very little impact. works, but also some people have tried to influence others by putting frames in this
way. But as I say, all the scientific evidence is that it has very little impact.
Well, it's fun to trace back the origins of some of these misconceptions. And you also
wonder why they persist so much. I mean, some of these things have become so ingrained in
the kind of collective consciousness. We just accept them on face value, but clearly
they're not true. I've been talking with Brian Clegg and the name of his book is Lightning
Often Strikes Twice, The 50 Biggest Misconceptions in Science. And if you want to read it, there's
a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks, Brian. Great to have you on.
Okay, great. Thanks very much.
Let's face it, modern work life is complicated.
But good news, we're here for you. I'm Kayla Lopez.
And I'm Kyle Hegge.
And together we've helped thousands of morning brew subscribers grow in their careers.
And now as the co-host of Purr My Last Email, we're bringing that advice straight to you
each week with hot takes and tactics on how to succeed in every area of work. Whether that's figuring out if you're being underpaid.
Or how to stand out in a remote work environment.
So join us each week on Per My Last email, on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, or wherever you
get your podcasts.
Hello, this is Jack Wilson inviting you to join me at the History of Literature podcast.
We cover everything from ancient epics to contemporary classics.
And we do so with intelligence, wisdom, creativity, and fun.
Our guests include award-winning novelists, brilliant scholars, and various other geniuses.
We have new episodes twice a week and an archive of more than 650 classic episodes, all for free.
Check out the History of Literature podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
It sure would be great if there was a way to tell if people were lying.
In fact, we've talked on this podcast about how to spot a liar by observing people and
looking at their behavior.
But the fact is you can never really tell a hundred percent. Some people are just good liars. If only there was a machine.
Well, there sort of is. It's called a polygraph, sometimes called a lie
detector. You see it in movies and TV shows and it's supposed to tell if
someone is being deceptive. So how does a lie detector or polygraph work?
And does it work? After all, the results of a polygraph test are not admissible in most courts.
So it makes you wonder, how accurate can it be?
Well, here to tell the fascinating story of the polygraph is Amit Katwala.
He's an award-winning journalist, a senior writer
at Wired, and author of the book Tremors in the Blood, Murder Obsession and the Birth
of the Lie Detector. Welcome, Amit.
Thanks for having me, Mike.
So what is the basic theory of how a polygraph is supposed to work. My understanding is that supposedly when you lie, because you're lying,
there are physical changes, like your heart rate increases and your blood pressure goes up,
things happen because you know you're lying and that that machine registers those changes and
aha, you're a liar. That's the principle or the theory and we'll get into why that maybe isn't necessarily true later on, I'm sure.
But yes, the theory is that if you are doing a polygraph exam, you are going to be scared about getting caught.
So when you get asked a question that you know you're going to have to lie on, your pulse will start going up, your blood pressure will go up,
you might start breathing differently. And a skilled polygraph examiner,
so the theory goes, should be able to tell the difference between someone who's lying
and someone who's telling the truth based on how those things change when they're asked
the question.
And so, and so I've always wondered, if you know that, why would you ever agree to be
tested?
It depends on the scenario, I think.
A lot of government jobs in the US
still require a polygraph exam, so certain military roles,
certain police roles.
So some people don't have a choice.
That was much more rampant until the late 80s,
when it was outlawed in commercial enterprises.
But there was a brief period when
even companies like McDonald's were doing polygraph tests
on their potential employees.
For criminal cases, you know,
I think sometimes it's presented as a way for people to clear their name. So I can see why if
you are innocent, you might be tempted by that. And maybe if you're guilty, you sort of think,
well, you know, I can maybe get away with it. It seems such a murky thing, because everybody who
knows about polygraphs knows that or at least the
legend is that they're not the results are not admissible in court. So how accurate could they
possibly be if a court is looking for the truth and refuses to use it?
Exactly. That's a really big kind of flaw in the polygraph. And actually the polygraph was one of
the devices that established
the set of standards that we now use to determine whether something is admissible in court or not.
It was one of the real test cases where they actually looked at it and they thought,
hang on, maybe this isn't really science. So where did it start? I mean, it sure would be great
to have something you could make somebody stick their finger in and go, oh, he's lying and be sure that you're
right.
So where did this all begin?
Who thought, hey, I got an idea?
The polygraph machine specifically,
which is, I guess, what most people think of now
when they think of a lie detector,
has its origins in Berkeley, California in the 1920s
with the Berkeley Police Department and a police
officer called John Larson. John Larson was a physiologist by
training, he wanted to become a criminologist, which is a very
new field at that time. And he took a job in Berkeley because
Berkeley was the Berkeley Police Department was led by a kind of
visionary police chief called August Vollmer. Vollmer was one
of the first police chiefs in America to try and bring science
or evidence
to policing. So he gave his officers bikes because he thought that that would enable
them to cover more ground. He gave them radios. He started doing crime mapping and all this
kind of pioneering stuff. And as part of that, he also started to hire college graduates
as police officers, which was a real revolutionary step at the time in the kind of 1910s, 1920s. So John Larson was one of these college cops and he and
Vollmer came across this paper by a guy called William Marston.
He was a psychologist at Harvard University and he noticed that
when he asked his peers to tell untrue stories, their blood
pressure went up. So Larson thought, well, okay, that's an interesting
insight, but how can I systematize that? How can I turn that into something objective that can be
measured and where the measurements can be recorded so that they can be referred back to you later?
And it's that insight, you know, how can you take this thing that we think we've identified
where blood pressure goes up when people lie? How can we turn that into a machine that is objective
rather than just based on a single person's observations?
So those are the real seeds of the polygraph.
When did it start getting used in police work?
I mean, seriously used in police work, where, you know,
let's hook this guy up to the machine
and tell him and figure out whether he's
telling the truth or not.
Funny enough, actually, for the first couple of years,
it was mainly, let's hook this girl up to the machine
rather than this guy.
So the first cases were in 1921, and they were overwhelmingly
looking at dormitory thefts at the University of Berkeley.
So that was the first case of the polygraph.
There was a women's only dorm in Berkeley,
and a bunch of stuff had gone missing,
like jewelry and cash and books and things like that. And this was the first case where the Berkeley Police Department were kind of called in
to run polygraph tests on all these young women to try and find out who did it. And so John Larson
went along with the machine and he ran tests on all these women, including the woman whose stuff had
been stolen to begin with. And eventually he came across a woman who blew up when the machine was connected to her,
refused to answer more questions,
and he kind of thought, well, she's the one who did it.
How widespread is the use of the polygraph?
I mean, is it used a lot, or is it mostly in movies
and occasionally here and there?
I mean, how well accepted is it?
The most recent estimates I have suggest that there are about
3 million lie detector tests a year in the United States. It's
used much more heavily in some countries than others. So the
US is a very, very heavy user of the polygraph. Japan is another
one. So yes, it was used and is used is still used by government
departments, you know, intelligence agencies and things
like that. But it's also used by police departments where they want to get a confession from someone without necessarily having to take
a case to trial. It's a much cheaper way of extracting a confession from someone if you
think they're guilty than having to go through the sort of expense and process of actually taking
them to trial. So it is still used quite widely. And you see this in kind of true crime documentaries all the time,
where the polygraph invariably pops up at some point in the investigation.
It's heyday was really in the kind of 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s, I think. So after Larsen
did these tests on women in college dorms, then they quickly started testing suspected murderers.
And then it kind of snowballed from there with the help of a guy called Leonard Keeler,
who was a high school student who really helped to popularize the machine.
Well, how accurate is it? If you take all the results of a polygraph, I mean, are you ever able
to say, well, you know, it's a, you know, 50-50. I mean, and if it's 50-50, what good is it?
Yeah, so the estimates range from as high as 85 to 90% to as
low as 60 to 65%. So it's not much better than tossing a coin.
And studies show that actually, as individuals, we can get it,
we can tell when someone's lying about 54% of the time. So it's
only slightly better than just human intuition. And I guess this
comes to the second point, which is, it's not really possible to actually assess how accurate the polygraph is when it comes to criminal investigations, because you never actually know what really happened. Say someone gets found guilty with the polygraph, then gets found guilty by a jury and gets sent to prison. That doesn't necessarily mean they were guilty. So you can never really know. All you can really tell is that in this case, the polygraph agreed with the jury. In this case, the polygraph didn't agree with the
jury, but juries are fallible as well. So you can never really tell how accurate the
polygraph actually is in the real world rather than in lab studies.
Well, what are the things that a polygraph machine is measuring? When we see the little
needle on the paper, what's
sending the needle, you know, up and down or not moving much or what are, what's it
measuring? Perhaps the easiest way to visualize this is by talking through the
equipment that you have on attached to you when you have a polygraph test done.
So the first thing that you will notice is there's a blood pressure cuff wrapped
around your arm. So that's measuring your pulse and also your blood pressure. So how fast your heart is beating and what your blood pressure is doing
at the same time. Then the second thing you'll have is you'll have two bands wrapped around your
chest, one to measure your breathing around the kind of higher up your chest and then one around
your diaphragm for lower down. And those are measuring your breathing rate. So how fast you're
taking in air and it's thought that liars might hold their breath while they're formulating a response
to a question that they know they're going to have to lie on or things like that.
And then the final thing is called galvanic skin response, which is basically sweat. So
this is usually attached to the fingertip and this measures how much you're sweating. So
each of those measurements will have a corresponding line on the polygraph chart and then the examiners will learn to interpret those lines in tandem to look for
kind of signs of what they consider to be lying.
And do each one of those things have its own little needle?
Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So and actually the technology hasn't changed since, you know,
the 1920s really. So in the initial one, yeah, you'd have four different lines on the chart
and then it's the kind of combination of those lines that will appear on the chart, you know,
in comp paper or nowadays it's on a computer screen.
So my sense is if somebody were to hook me up to one of those machines and you
know strap things around my chest and a blood pressure cuff that I would that my blood pressure
would go up just because of the experience of having to do this test and people suspecting
I'm lying that that just being there would make me look like a liar.
Exactly. The machine is supposed to work on the premise that liars will be nervous,
but people are nervous for all sorts of reasons, right? There's no way of telling whether someone is
sweaty because they're lying or sweaty because they're nervous about being wrongly accused of lying.
Or maybe they're lying.
Or maybe they're lying, yeah. But you just can't tell.
And that's the big problem with the polygraph.
Even if 90% of people would show a particular result on the polygraph,
that doesn't mean it's true for everyone.
And that's the big problem.
There's no single telltale sign of lying that works for everyone all of the time.
Researchers in the field say there's no Pinocchio's nose.
There's nothing that is going to give you the right answer with enough certainty, enough
times to be valid to use in a courtroom setting, for instance.
At what point did people, I mean, was it assumed more or less from the beginning that this
was pretty accurate and then somebody showed that it wasn't?
Or were people skeptical from the beginning?
Or how did it kind of fall out of favor to the extent
that courts won't use it?
So it's actually been barred from the courtroom
for a really, really long time.
So Laston invented the machine in 1921.
And there was a famous case called the Frye case, which
was set a precedent that the polygraph couldn't be used in the courtroom.
And that was actually in, I think, 1923. So it really wasn't long afterwards. But even the people that invented the polygraph kind of had their misgivings about it quite early on, and thought that it shouldn't have been used as widely as it was being used even back then.
as widely as it was being used even back then. So John Larson, who invented it, was really excited about it for the first couple of years, but then he saw how his scientific caution kind of got blown
away by hype and press coverage. And then by the end of his life, he hated the machine. He thought
it was like a Frankenstein's monster that he'd unleashed on the world. So I would say that within 10 years, there were serious doubts about the efficacy of
the polygraph.
But by then, the hype and the drama around it sort of overtook it all and it really snowballed.
The guy or the woman who's operating the machine and asking the questions. It would seem that the
results might be open to interpretation that one person might administer a
test and say one thing and another person might interpret it another way or
is it an objective result? It's very very subjective so yes you can give two
different examiners the same chart to examine and they could come up with
completely different answers as to whether the person was lying.
It almost sounds like because it is so subjective and because people are so different that it's
basically worthless.
Yes, essentially, that would be my contention. I mean, I think that the machine has obviously
helped to put criminals away, there's
no getting around that. But the problem is that it's also
perpetrated serious miscarriages of justice. Essentially, the
reason the polygraph has been so successful is because of the
theatre around it, right? It works because people believe it
works so that the mere threat of being attached to a polygraph
can compel someone to confess to the crime
before the exam even takes place,
because they're so worried about being found out,
because they believe the machine works,
even if it doesn't actually work.
Yeah, that sounds like that's the real secret
to the polygraph, that if somebody refuses to take one,
maybe we better give this guy a closer look.
I mean, you don't even need a polygraph machine
some of the time, so there's a great story from David Simon's book about policing in Baltimore where he
describes the situation.
And I think it's recreated in an episode of The Wire actually, where the police officers
didn't have a polygraph available.
So they used a Xerox machine and they put the subject's hand on a Xerox machine and
told the subject that it was a lie detector and then just got the machine to print out
a piece of paper with, he's lying written on it. And that was enough to kind of trick the
suspect into actually believing that the machine could read their mind. Well, it does the job.
Get the guy to confess because he thinks he's in a corner, basically.
Exactly. Yes, it does the job. It's all about the theater of it. And actually,
they realized this very early on, the inventor of the polygraph job. It's all about the theater of it. And actually, they realized this very early
on, the inventor of the polygraph,
that it was largely about the theater.
So they did take steps to amp that up.
So the people who administer the test and interpret the results,
what's their training?
I mean, if two people can look at the same chart
and come up with different results,
how did they get to come up with different results.
How did they get to come up with those different results?
Because they were trained how?
Yes.
So, to train to become a polygraph examiner, well, there's no real regulation stopping
you from just buying a polygraph machine on eBay and then advertising your services.
But most polygraph examiners that are operating today have
certification from something called the American Polygraph Association. However,
in order to get certification from the American Polygraph Association requires a 12-week course,
I think it is. So we're talking about a few thousand dollars, a few months, and then that's it.
dollars a few months and then that's it. There are other ways that people claim to be able to tell if someone is lying and it's usually you know it's usually
not just one thing but if you watch somebody over a period of time and
compare it to a baseline that you can get a sense whether they're lying and I
I'm wondering has anyone ever tested the polygraph
versus those kind of ways of determining deception
and to see which is more accurate?
Those ways of, I don't know if there's ever
been a direct comparison done with the same subjects,
but a lot of other methods of detecting lies
have been very thoroughly tested.
But they all suffer from the same sort of fatal flaw,
which is, you can't be sure. And with something like lie
detection, you kind of need to be sure right if you are running
someone in a murder case where the crime is, you know, capital
punishment, then you need to be 100% sure that they are going to
be susceptible to the particular type of lie detector you're
trying to use on them. And there's no evidence to suggest that everyone will display exactly
the same range of physiological responses to telling a lie. And actually, you might expect
that a psychopath or a serial killer might not actually show the range of emotional responses
that you would expect. So maybe those people are actually less susceptible to lie detectors than
your ordinary man on the street street because they already have a kind
of different range of emotional responses. And actually that's what we're looking for
with the polygraph.
So it's still used today and is it basically used because it's better than nothing?
Yeah, I think it's used because it's convenient. So if you can get a confession from someone
using the polygraph, that's much cheaper than having to go out and collect all the evidence
and then take the case to court and all that kind of stuff. It is slowly being superseded
by different forms of lie detection in some fields. I think there's kind of new inventions
that are cheaper to run than the polygraph that don't require a trained examiner and all this kind of stuff. So we might see it shifting away from the polygraph
towards new forms of lie detection in the future. But it's convenient. People believe
it works and it gets results sometimes. Actually, a lot of the time it gets the results that
the people running the test are looking for. Whether it actually gets to the truth is a
kind of different question. When a polygraph test is given, it's all yes or no questions, right? It isn't so tell me
about it's strictly yes or no. That's right. The way it's portrayed in film and TV is quite wrong,
actually, because it's kind of portrayed as this back and forth between the investigator and the
suspect. But yes, actually, the way that the test was originally designed was, yeah, these
very, very slow yes or no questions are repeated multiple times over the course of several
hours. The suspect gives yes or no responses because the point is you want to minimize
the difference between the control questions, which are irrelevant to the crime, and the target questions,
which are about the crime.
So you want the suspect to be sitting as still as possible
to reduce interference.
So you don't want them to be spinning out
long sentences and things like that.
You want to keep the differences to a minimum
so that when they do lie, it shows up on the chart.
Or at least that's a theory anyway.
What's pretty interesting is the polygraph
has really had pretty good PR, it seems, for a long time,
given the facts.
I mean, it still gets used.
People still believe it works.
And yet there isn't a whole lot of science behind it, it seems.
Yeah, that's right.
It's just somehow become sort of embedded in the justice system. And I think a lot of people have debunked it. It's been debunked by numerous academic studies, government reports, expert analysis on several occasions, but it just sort of refuses to go away. And I think that's probably something to do with human nature, right? We're drawn to this idea that a machine can reveal the truth, right?
Especially in a time when truth is so difficult to find.
I think this idea that there is a machine that can do it for us is still quite compelling.
Well, now I think I want to get hooked up.
I want to have a polygraph test just to have the experience.
I've been talking with Amit Katwala.
He is an award-winning journalist, a senior writer
at Wired, and author of the book Tremors
in the Blood, Murder Obsession and the Birth of the Lie
Detector.
And you will find a link to that book in the show notes.
Thank you, Amit.
Thanks so much for having me.
I appreciate it. Women drivers have gotten a bad rap over the years.
Statistics show that actually they're better drivers overall than men are.
Women are involved in fewer accidents, have fewer insurance claims, and don't wind up
with as many moving violations as men do.
And some surveys have found that women are also superior parkers. Researchers watched 2,500 drivers park and scored them on technique, precision, and time taken.
The women were better at picking accessible spaces and at lining up their vehicles to park them.
Women out-parked the guys in parallel parking situations as well.
They were more likely to back
in, which is the method preferred by driving experts. And that is something
you should know. If you enjoyed today's podcast, don't keep it to yourself.
Share it with someone you know. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to
Something You Should Know. For a long time now I've been recommending the
Jordan Harbinger Show as another
podcast you might want to listen to. The Jordan Harbinger Show is different than something you
should know, but as you'll see, it aligns well with this audience. Meaning, if you like this podcast,
you're probably going to like that one. The Jordan Harbinger Show. Each episode is a conversation with a different
fascinating guest. Recently he had on Amanda Ripley talking about how to
survive an unthinkable disaster, which strikes close to home for me having just
been through the fires and mudslides in California and evacuated twice. He also
spoke with Jay Dobbins who's a former ATF agent who went undercover with the Hells
Angels.
Now, that's a conversation worth hearing.
And listening to his conversations will make you a more critical thinker about the world
around you.
Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show, and there's a good chance it finds its way into your regular
rotation of podcasts.
The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts,
Spotify, or wherever you listen.
Hello, I am Kristin Russo.
And I am Jenny Owen Youngs.
We are the hosts of Buffering the Vampire Slayer
once more with, spoilers, a rewatch podcast covering
all 144 episodes of, you guessed it,
Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
We are here to humbly invite you to join us all 144 episodes of, you guessed it, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
We are here to humbly invite you to join us
for our fifth Buffy Prom, which, if you can believe it,
we are hosting at the actual Sunnydale High School.
That's right, on April 4th and 5th,
we will be descending upon the campus
of Torrance High School, which was the filming location
for Buffy's Sunnydale High,
to dance the night away, to 90s music
in the iconic courtyard, to sip on punch
right next to the Sunnydale High fountain,
and to nerd out together in our prom best
inside of the set of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
All information and tickets can be found
at bufferingcast.com slash prom.
Come join us.