Magic Lasso
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The Lasso of Truth or Magic Lasso is a weapon used by DC Comics superheroine Wonder Woman, Princess Diana of Themyscira. It forces anyone it captures to obey and tell the truth.
William Moulton Marston created Wonder Woman but he also worked, in the period during and after World War I, on the systolic blood-pressure test used to detect deception while he was a doctoral student in the psychology department at Harvard University. This was the predecessor of the polygraph test. His wife Elizabeth Holloway Marston, was a masters student at Radcliffe College and was also important to this research: "According to Marston’s son, it was his mother Elizabeth, Marston’s wife, who suggested to him that 'When she got mad or excited, her blood pressure seemed to climb'". Although Elizabeth is not listed as Marston’s collaborator in his early work, Lamb, Matte (1996), and others refer directly and indirectly to Elizabeth’s work on her husband’s deception research. She also appears in a picture taken in his polygraph laboratory in the 1920s (reproduced in Marston, 1938)."
Wonder Woman's Magic Lasso or Golden Lasso was the direct result of their research.[5][2] In noting the correlation between it and the systolic blood-pressure test, Geoffry Bunn states: “ Anyone caught in the lasso found it impossible to lie. And because Wonder Woman used it to extract confessions and compel obedience, the golden lasso was of course nothing less than a lie detector [...] Like the lie detector upon which it was modelled, Wonder Woman's Golden Lasso produced truth - and by implication justice and freedom too - through coercion."