Stories and legends about truth serum have intrigued people for many years for a number of reasons. After all, intelligence agencies, justice officials, company and corporate executives, and husbands and wives seeking ways to extract the truth from their relatives, employees, and spies during divorce proceedings and property divisions.
Why do people lie?
The main character of the famous TV series “Everybody Lies,” Dr. House, perhaps best defined the reasons why we tend to tell lies.
The vast majority of people produce lies in the following way:
- consciously and unconsciously;
- out of fear of being exposed and punished;
- to gain benefit or completely selflessly;
- with the purpose of not fulfilling one’s duties at work, service or in one’s personal life;
- a variant of pathological lying is the enjoyment of being able to fool others;
- to justify oneself and slander another person.
It has now become widespread lie detector in Ukraine to solve such problems, but the path to creating a new technique was not easy and included many centuries of searching for a miraculous elixir called truth serum.
For centuries, humanity has attempted to find the most humane way to define deception and search for truth.
The lie detector – history of creation
Famous historical figures can be considered the forefathers of truth serum. Many myths about this remedy are probably fictitious, but a number of studies have been conducted in reality.
Here are some people who have tried to solve the problem of lie detection in various ways:
- the cunning sage Hodja Nasreddin with his “magic wands” growing in the hands of a thief;
- the famous medieval scientist Avicenna came up with a method of interrogation involving pulse measurement;
- The author of “Robinson Crusoe” Daniel Defoe drew attention to the peculiar pulsations of blood that appear during interrogation in a person who feels guilty for what he has done.
A more scientific approach to the search for truth serum is characteristic of representatives of the academic scientific school.
Cesare Lombroso
The Italian criminologist developed an original interrogation technique using psychophysical secrets. He was the first to implement a system for determining the key criteria of an individual’s behavior.
William Moulton Marston
A Harvard University employee invented a device to measure blood pressure during interrogations during World War I.
John Larson
The creator of the prototype of the lie detector we all know today—the polygraph, which simultaneously records breathing rhythm, pulse rate, and blood pressure—was a California police officer who developed his device in the 1920s.
What substances were used to create truth serum?
Beginning in the second half of the 19th century, for about a hundred years in many countries, laboratories in law enforcement agencies worked to find formulas for substances that would allow anyone to “talk.”
Several drugs have been considered quite effective over a period of time.
Scopolamine
For the first time, quite by accident, an obstetrician from the state of Texas, Robert House, discovered a side effect of this painkiller in the form of a person’s correct and clear answers to any question when he was administered a carefully selected dose of scopolamine.
A technique called “narcoanalysis” has become very popular in forensic science, but a number of incidents have led courts to stop accepting information obtained under the influence of anesthesia as evidence.
Sodium aminal
The psychotropic substance significantly increased the talkativeness of those being interrogated. However, in many cases, due to physiological characteristics, the drug’s effectiveness was very limited, and it had to be abandoned when filing indictments in court.
Mescaline
In the 1940s, the American Office of Strategic Services used a drug derived from the peyote cactus as a truth serum. However, the desired result of 100% certainty of truthful testimony was again not achieved.
A lie detector is the best truth serum.
The use of a polygraph is the optimal research option in terms of the absence of chemical influence on the human body, as well as careful quality control of the experiments conducted.
The final result is subject to strict supervision—an analysis of all polygrams, reflecting the person’s physiological response to questions and their state of mind during the answers. A qualified specialist also uses a lie detector in Ukraine, along with a video recording of the test, ensuring compliance with the psychophysiological research protocol.
Today, the polygraph has no alternative as the best and most humane truth serum.