So behavioral scientists have a leg up on technology as far as interrogation goes?
I think that’s right. You think of things like thermal imaging and pupil dilation, and you can look at heart rate with ultrawideband radar, and blood pressure and breathing rate and galvanic skin response—signals like sweat—and you can look at the constellation of all of these things, and they may tell you that the person is aroused or that he’s having an autonomic response. But it’s a big leap from that to “He’s lying.” I’ve undergone polygraphs, and I will tell you it’s a very stressful experience. And some people react very differently to stress than others without being liars at all.
Does torture work as a method of extracting the truth?
I’m going to go back to the findings of the Intelligence Science Board, a group of scientists who advised the U.S. intelligence community and studied the most effective ways to gather information in a free society. When they looked at all the techniques that are used, their conclusion is that we don’t have the behavioral science to give us the answers. As to coercive methods, I don’t think we have good information to say one way or another. [The notion that] if you’re in intense pain then you’ll break may not be true.
What is the hottest area today in deception detection?
Human lie detectors. I think the low-tech training of humans to be better interpreters of information is where the most productive work is going to be. The reason being that you can either train a human to do it or train a computer to do it, and human brains are still much better computers than computers are.
Is there any technique that scares or worries you?
I think it’s inevitable that with neuroscience we’re going to get to a point where, without [a person’s] cooperation, we can be pretty accurate about knowing what a person knows or feels or thinks. And so I wouldn’t say it scares me, but I would say that there are going to be some really tough issues for society to deal with [regarding] where privacy and human dignity begin and the right of the larger group to protect itself ends.
It’s kind of like the same question as: Is it okay to take the fingerprint of a criminal or a suspect? Yes. Is it okay to take their DNA? Less clear. Is it okay to find out what’s going on in their brain without their cooperation? Let’s say we can train a computer to do better than a human does looking at facial expressions and body language and everything else, right? I think that it will be possible and maybe not too far off in the future. So imagine if a computer can look at you through a camera and know whether you are suppressing information or having feelings that are not consistent with what you’re saying, and you don’t have any ability to volunteer that. I think that society has got to wrestle with that question. And I’m not saying that I’m scared, I’m saying that I’m not optimistic that there are any easy answers.
