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

Before DISC existed, William Moulton Marston investigated the link between blood pressure and lying, work considered a forerunner of the modern lie detector. His story ties together a Harvard lab, a federal court, a book about emotions and a superheroine.

A psychologist who wanted to study healthy people

William Moulton Marston (1893-1947) was a psychologist, a lawyer and an author of popular psychology essays. His 1928 book is pointedly titled Emotions of Normal People: he wanted to describe the everyday emotions of people without pathology, at a time when much of the most widely read personality psychology came from the clinic.

Thomas Erikson, in his popular book Surrounded by Idiots (2014), presents him as a contrast to Freud and Jung. That’s a simplification, since Jung also wrote about psychological types in healthy people, but it captures Marston’s intent well.

That approach explains why DISC is used today in training and in work teams, not in clinical practice: it was born to describe everyday behavior, not to diagnose.

The blood-pressure test that led to the polygraph

Before DISC, Marston worked in a very different field. In 1917 he published a study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology arguing that systolic blood pressure (the pressure at the moment the heart contracts most strongly) rose detectably when a person lied.

His test made it to court. In 1923, in Frye v. United States, the defense of a man accused of murder sought to call Marston as an expert witness to show, with his test, that the defendant was telling the truth. The judge refused, and the Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia upheld the decision with an argument that made history: a scientific technique can only be admitted at trial once it has gained general acceptance in its field, and Marston’s had not.

That “Frye standard” governed US federal courts for decades, until it was replaced by another criterion in the 1993 Daubert case, and some states still apply it. It’s a curious irony: Marston’s main legal legacy is a rule that served to reject his own invention.

The underlying debate is still open. In 2003, a review by the US National Research Council concluded that the scientific basis of the polygraph is weak and that, although it discriminates better than chance, it is far from infallible. What Marston sensed, that the body reacts when we lie, is partly true; what hasn’t been shown is that this reaction can reliably tell a lie apart from nerves.

From the lab to Wonder Woman

The story takes a famous detour. In 1941 Marston created Wonder Woman, who debuted that year with art by Harry G. Peter. Historian Jill Lepore reconstructed in The Secret History of Wonder Woman (2014) how Marston’s life and ideas, including his interest in truth and deception, seeped into the character. The lasso that compels whoever it catches to tell the truth is the most often cited example.

Both lines of work, the lab and the comic book, share the same underlying question: what the body reveals about what’s going on inside, beyond what the person chooses to tell.

1928: Emotions of Normal People and the seed of DISC

In Emotions of Normal People, Marston proposed four basic emotional responses. In the usual reading of his scheme, he organized them around two questions: whether the person perceives the environment as favorable or opposing, and whether they respond to it actively or passively. The idea of reducing character to four groups has very old precedents, as we explain in our article on where the words choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic and melancholic come from, although Marston’s scheme doesn’t derive from the humors.

Marston didn’t turn his theory into a test. That step was taken by another psychologist, Walter V. Clarke, who in the 1940s built a personnel-selection questionnaire from a list of adjectives people use to describe themselves. He called it the Activity Vector Analysis and published its construction in 1956 in The Journal of Psychology. Its four factors closely resembled Marston’s four emotions.

That line of questionnaires led, in the 1970s, to John Geier’s Personal Profile System, which settled the acronym and the format we now associate with DISC. So between Marston’s book and the test used in companies lay almost fifty years and several hands.

The names that didn’t survive

The original names of the four categories aren’t the ones in use today. In the usual reading of Marston:

• Dominance: an active response to an environment perceived as opposing or resistant.
• Inducement: an active response in a favorable environment, drawing others in or persuading them.
• Submission: a passive, voluntary response to a favorable environment, willingly yielding to someone you value.
• Compliance: a passive response to an opposing environment perceived as stronger: adapting to its rules.

The last one deserves a closer look. Here Compliance doesn’t mean eagerness to please; it means conformity with a rule or a stronger force. Commercial versions renamed it Conscientiousness or Cautious, and Thomas Erikson, in his book, describes it as “analytical ability”.

Of the four original words, only Dominance survives unchanged. Inducement became Influence; Submission became Steadiness. The D-I-S-C acronym that seems so fixed today is the result of almost a century of reworkings of one psychologist’s idea, and each profile in the series (D, I, S and C) explains what its letter meant in the original.

From a 1928 theory to a commercial tool

After Geier, DISC became a product. Several companies, such as TTI Success Insights, founded by Bill Bonnstetter, developed their own standardized versions for commercial use. In his book, Erikson cites a figure of around 50 million people who have supposedly taken some version of the test; it’s an industry figure we haven’t been able to check against an independent source.

Its spread doesn’t amount to scientific backing. DISC has little independent, peer-reviewed research behind it, and most reliability data comes from the providers themselves. It works well as a shared language for talking about behavior in a team, but there’s no solid evidence that a person’s predominant style predicts job performance.

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

Sources

• Clarke, W. V. (1956). The construction of an industrial selection personality test. The Journal of Psychology, 41(2), 379.
• Erikson, T. (2014). Omgiven av idioter. Hoi Förlag.
• Frye v. United States, 293 F. 1013 (D.C. Cir. 1923).
• Lepore, J. (2014). The Secret History of Wonder Woman. Knopf.
• Marston, W. M. (1917). Systolic blood pressure symptoms of deception. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2(2), 117-163.
• Marston, W. M. (1928). Emotions of Normal People. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.
• National Research Council (2003). The Polygraph and Lie Detection. National Academies Press. doi:10.17226/10420