Will Handwriting Be The New Polygraph?
Handwriting-based Tool Offers Alternate Lie Detection Method
MOUNT CARMEL, HAIFA, ISRAEL—August 26, 2009—For ages experts and laymen have been analyzing and trying to crack the code of handwriting characteristics, in order to detect an individual’s personality traits, or in most cases, gauge their innocence in the case of a crime. Although this science has often gone the way of pseudoscience, researchers are now discovering that with the aid of a computerized tool, handwriting characteristics can be measured more effectively.
The research, headed by Gil Luria and Sara Rosenblum at the University of Haifa, is published in an upcoming issue of Applied Cognitive Psychology. The researchers utilized a computerized tablet that measured the physical properties of the subject’s handwriting, which are difficult to consciously control (for example: the duration of time that the pen is on paper versus in the air, the length height and width of each writing stroke, the pressure implemented on the writing surface). They have found that these handwriting characteristics differ when an individual is in the process of writing deceptive sentences as opposed to truthful sentences.The handwriting tool has the potential to replace, or work in tandem, with popular, verbal-based lie detection technology such as the polygraph to ensure greater accuracy and objectivity in law enforcement deception detection. Additionally, polygraphs are often intrusive to the subject and sometimes inconclusive. The handwriting tool therefore provides ease and increased accuracy over common, verbal-based methods.
Announcements of the latest and greatest tool for detecting deception have become relatively routine, Indeed, I received another email just yesterday from a psychologist asking "whether body language, voice stress analysis, and layered voice analysis are accepted in criminal trials as methods that are reliable and valid ways to determine "deception" or "lying?" The concern here was about the media coverage of an investigator using layered voice analysis on HaLeigh Cumming's step-mom, and the media's public promotion of the idea that there are valid methods of determining deception. The suggestion, I guess, is that it's lawyers who are preventing valid scientific method from being used in the courtroom.
There's no reason to explain, yet again, the dangers of junk science. There's no reason to explain why methodologies that are less than accurate are inherently dangerous. But there's good reason to be aware of the fact that there are many out there promoting the notion that the tools for "greater accuracy and objectivity in law enforcement deception detection (note that it's to benefit law enforcement, not justice)" exist.
My concern is it's just a matter of time before the next round of junk science infiltrates the courtroom. As lie detection methodologies are developed and promoted, as with this press release, combined with such popular nonsense as the TV shows like Lie to Me* and CSI, some judge somewhere is going to hold a Daubert hearing and announce that the Holy Grail has been found.
Science is a wonderful thing. Unfortunately, junk science is far more pervasive. And as we are painfully aware, its employment to remove the burden from a jury of having to decide issues of fact and providing them with what facially appears to be conclusive proof has done enormous harm to many innocent people. And yet it keeps coming.
The technology they are using could be used to determine if the subject is intoxicated or has a disease or some other condition that impairs their ability to write and spell. It appears to me that those factors would have to be taken into account before one could even think about using the technology it to detect lies.
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