Why the US still puts so much weight on them when they know they don't work is a mystery to me. Just get rid of the damn things and do your homework better.
The trouble comes from the fact that in order for all of this to work, you need to say the polygraph works. If you admit it's fake, or even if your procedures imply it's fake, it loses its magic. And so you naturally develop procedures that put a lot of stock in the polygraph. People start to believe in it. You build up a culture that relies on the magic of the polygraph. And then things like this happen.
This is the standard way human discourse happens when talking about something for which there is no evidence of efficacy. You back up and try to rationalize some other reason for it's use, even when it makes no sense. Like in this case, using it to get people to admit things, can lead to false confessions or false convictions, especially when some of the people you threaten to use it on know it doesn't work! Do you think the agent who knows it doesn't work, and just uses it as a threat, is going to drop the case when you take the polygraph and fail? Nope!
It remind me very much of when people discuss some supplement that doesn't have evidence: "Oh well those studies didn't use enough/too much/wrong schedule" or acupuncture : "oh well even if it doesn't work the placebo effect is valuable"
you just can't get through to people
I bet a lot of people also crack and admit to things they never did. You're essentially using the stress associated with the "magic" of the polygraph to coerce a confession.
This is a bug not a feature, if everyone strapped to it are stressed out there's nothing for even a trained interrogator to read. Everyone is going to look like they're lying.
1. there is a lot of stress around the fact that if you don't pass the poly, you don't have a clearance and so you don't have a career
2. you will "fail" at least one poly in each cycle so the stakes are raised in subsequent interviews RE: #1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADE_651
Sold to law enforcement in military around the world for a while.
Perhaps a similar logic is at work for the military, but one would think they'd be more concerned with actual efficacy of such a device so it seems more likely it was just collusion between purchasers and sellers to siphon tax money.
It might be psychological warfare.
I would wager that a surprisingly large number of people think that polygraphs detect lies. An even larger number are probably open to the possibility.
If you hook up somebody in that group to a polygraph, you probably rocket their stress levels through the ceiling, which might push them to crack. Behavior under stress is a fascinating thing.
Honestly, I had a snarky comment ready for a comment lower-down about the rationale for polygraphs, but I thought about it a bit, and can't, off the top of my head, come up with a faster, cheaper, and safer way to put that kind of stress on a person.
Useless against somebody trained -- like, say, an intelligence operative -- but it might not be as stupid as it appears on the surface.
Being pseudoscience or not is not quite the same question. People claim acupuncture works for them (California is now forcing insurance to pay for it), but it is clearly based on pseudoscience.
I'd put those at about 100%. So you will end up with nervous people who will increase the size of the haystack with zero chance of identifying the needles, which is a net negative.
http://skepdic.com/coldread.html
It works as long as the "mark" is naive. As James Randi explained many times.
Which is why intelligence communities want to suppress information about polygraphs that would make people less naive.
Makes perfect sense.
Even if everyone knows it's crap, it can persist because of institutional inertia and because no one has come up with anything better. That's what happened to us, so we shouldn't be surprised to see it elsewhere.
It's a psychological tactic, and is all about pressure. It serves as a potential deterrent and mind game that works on multiple levels. Consider it like a scarecrow in a field. Yeah, some of the smart crows will figure out it's just some clothes on a pole, but it still deters and confuses the rest. The only silly thing would be calling a scarecrow a security guard or a polygraph a lie detector test. It doesn't mean it's silly to put a scarecrow in your field.
Obviously it's 99.9% pseudoscience, and obviously it's beatable and unreliable, but I don't think that's the point. I'm sure they're very much aware of that, and still use it because they see the value of it as a psychological tactic. It's one of many lines of defense: if you pass that line of defense, it definitely doesn't at all imply you're not a spy, but if you don't pass it (in any way), the security requirements dictate that the safest option is for them to not hire you.
Absolutely no positive value should be attributed to a passing result. The idea is exclusively to attribute negative value to a failing result. And then, not value in terms of some actual empirical finding ("was this person really being deceitful?"), but just value in terms of whether or not to hire them to handle the most sensitive of secrets.
The only abomination is using it as a consequential determination of truth or lie, or innocence or guilt, like in a police investigation or trial. It should never be permitted in such a circumstance for any reason.
Because for a lot this lets you continue whatever spectre of activism they are pursuing. Remember the Justice Kavannaugh sage and his accusers taking polygraph tests?
So, polys _do_ sort of work, but not in the way they are presented to the public.
The rationale for continued use in clearance screenings is that it's not scientific, but it's better than nothing.
Polygraphs as a power play - well, I'm sure it happens but that probably isn't the reason it is in the room. Maybe the polygraph is a ruse to make people think FBI questioners are stupider than they really are? I can see value in having a distraction from the actual questions.
Conclusion is still that it's nowhere near reliable enough to be used for anything, but the principle that people show physiological responses when answering truthfully or not about things is sort of true (I don't think that was ever under debate, still was a fun experiment).
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/05/22/jeremy-kyle-gues...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/05/13/jeremy-kyle-take...
In other words, long proven nonsense as long as you don't believe in it.
(1) https://antipolygraph.org/lie-behind-the-lie-detector.pdf (Chapter 3)
It is insane it's still being used in the US.
>It is to be noted that around the time Ma applied for employment with the FBI, the Bureau had a roughly 50% polygraph failure rate for special agent applicants, with many honest persons being wrongly branded as liars and barred for life from FBI employment
So either 50% of FBI Applicants were actually foreign agents AND believed in polygraphs (why would they if they were trained foreign agents?) OR it's just total bullshit. I think the "it works if you believe in it and some people do" myth is just that...
It's a very attractive idea that we can tell (even partially) whether someone is lying. We actually might be able to with an fMRI setup I think. But polygraphs should be long gone as rubbish. I have no idea why anyone in the USA takes them seriously.
Now that makes me wonder, if they don’t use fMRI is it because it’s also just a prop but with more studies behind it?
Pretty much every manipulation technique used in negotiation, sales and interrogation is useless if the person it's being applied to realizes it. Polygraphs are about the lowest quality because the machine is right f-ing there for the world to see whereas with other techniques there's at least a non-zero chance that the person using them is being earnest and it's not just a technique.
That is just wholly incorrect. The whole point of marketing is that it works even if you know it's happening to you. Anchoring, a common sales tactic, works even if you know they're doing it to you. You can absolutely respond to it with your own tactics if you know about it, but it still effects you. We really aren't better than our animal brains.
After the exercise, we dived into how it worked and how to prepare and counter anchoring. Then we ran a slightly different, but similar, exercise. Even when highly educated students were fully aware of how anchoring worked, and that they were susceptible to it, and knowing ways to ways to counter it, deals still tended to be closer to the initial reference point.
It certainly helps to know ways in which you may be manipulated, but knowledge does not make you immune by any stretch of the imagination.
It was a Xerox machine.
Not really sure what the consensus among neuroscientists and psychologists is with regard to weather they are reliable lie detectors or not though.
50 percent chance a criminal gets let through.
If that’s true it’s a wonder the FBI managed to get this far and continues to function.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/nov/21/uk-water-fi...
Just call it "AI".
There's a great book on the inventor called the Secret History of Wonder Woman: https://www.amazon.com/Secret-History-Wonder-Woman/dp/080417...
However, while it makes people more talkative, it doesn't make them more truthful. So it is not considered effective as an interrogation technique.
* lie detectors/polygraphs
* blood splatter patterns
* hair analysis
* bite mark analysis
* criminal profiling
In other words don’t ignore the possibility but work with that limitation.
Maybe they do this and people still do it, if so they’re doing a poor job of it.
That hasn't happened[1].
Lying is a complex behavior. Like, really complex. Even with all of modern technology, we've only just started to detect far more gross brain functions: pre-speech motor patterns, fear responses, etc.
It goes without saying that an MRI is at least slightly more complicated than something you could knock together in an afternoon after a shopping trip to Radio Shack in 1963.
Polygraphs are a $2 billion industry, and Upton Sinclair said it best: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
As far as I know, this is complete fiction right now. Same with images.
There are people currently working with AI interpreting brain signals to be reproducible, to say, move left and right in a game. It's far from working on "left" / "right", let alone anything more sophisticated than that.
I imagine it's about as reproducible as most fmri research, as in not.
However, it would be very expensive to develop the training data for such a system, and it might not work on rare ethnicities. Or other abnormal people, like autists and evil geniuses.
I say all of this as a horrible liar.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/how-cheat-lie-detec...
