The Creator of the DISC Model Also Invented an Early Lie Detector

Before creating the behavioral model we know today as DISC, William Moulton Marston investigated the link between blood pressure and lying, a finding that would eventually give rise to the modern lie detector.

A psychologist who studied healthy people, not patients

William Moulton Marston was a popular psychology author at a time when most of his more influential peers were looking in a different direction. According to what Thomas Erikson recounts in Surrounded by Idiots (2014), both Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud had built much of their earlier work around studying people with mental instability. Marston took the opposite path: he wanted to understand the behavioral patterns of psychologically healthy people, with no pathology involved.

That shift in focus wasn’t a minor detail. Studying “normal” behavior instead of clinical behavior is exactly what let Marston arrive at a model built for anyone’s everyday life (how they act in a meeting, how they react under pressure, how they communicate with others), not a diagnostic tool reserved for clinical settings. That distinction is still, nearly a century later, what sets DISC apart from other personality models more rooted in clinical psychology.

The blood-pressure test that led to the polygraph

Before becoming the psychologist now associated with DISC, Marston had researched in a completely different field: he tried to demonstrate that systolic blood pressure (the pressure measured at the heart’s moment of peak contraction) shifted in a detectable way when a person lied. That work, aimed at detecting deception, is the direct predecessor of the lie detector still used today.

It’s a curious fact rarely mentioned alongside the DISC model: the same psychologist who laid the groundwork for one of the most widely used behavioral tools in team training and HR worldwide began his career investigating how the body gives away deception without the person consciously controlling it. Two lines of work, seemingly far apart, that share the same underlying question: what the body reveals about what’s happening inside, beyond whatever the person decides to say in words.

1928: Emotions of Normal People and the birth of the DISA model

In 1928, Marston published Emotions of Normal People, the book where he systematically investigated behavioral differences among healthy people. That book laid the groundwork for what was then known as the DISA model, the direct seed of the DISC we use today. Marston observed clear, repeatable differences in how different people reacted to their environment, and from there proposed four broad categories of behavior.

The model itself wasn’t called DISC from the start, and Marston didn’t even develop it into its final form: it was Walter Clarke who, back in the 1950s, took Marston’s original observations and turned them into the DISA concept that would later evolve into today’s DISC. More than two decades passed between the original idea and the tool used in thousands of companies today, along with the involvement of someone other than its original creator.

The names that didn’t survive the passage of time

Here’s perhaps the most surprising fact for anyone familiar with today’s DISC: the original names Marston gave his four categories aren’t the ones used today. Marston defined them like this:

• Dominance: produces activity in a hostile or antagonistic environment.
• Inducement: produces activity in a favorable environment.
• Submission: produces passivity in a favorable environment.
• Compliance: produces passivity in a hostile or antagonistic environment.

Two of those four words, Inducement and Submission, have all but vanished from everyday DISC vocabulary, replaced over time by Influence and Steadiness. Thomas Erikson, in his own book, chooses to translate the fourth category, Compliance, as “analytical ability” rather than compliance, because he considers it a better description of people with that profile. It’s a good reminder that the letters D-I-S-C, which today seem fixed and unchangeable, are actually the result of nearly a century of successive reworkings of one psychologist’s original idea.

From a 1930s study to a tool used by millions

Marston wrapped up his research in this area sometime in the 1930s, but that’s not where the model’s story ends. According to Erikson, many other people later picked up his research and turned it into the tool known today; American Bill Bonnstetter, for instance, made a decisive contribution to building instruments capable of analyzing a person more fully, and companies like TTI Success Insights, in the United States, have offered a commercially standardized DISC analysis ever since. According to the figures Erikson himself cites, the tool descended from Marston’s original work has been used by close to 50 million people over the last 35 years, a number that gives some sense of how far an idea has traveled that began, quite literally, by measuring the blood pressure of someone telling a lie.

Want to find out which of those four styles, under the names we use today, fits you best? The DISC 4 Colors test shows you in just a few minutes.