The polygraph is pseudoscience. Of course it can be beaten, it doesn't work to begin with.
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.
I think its a way to get people to admit to things. Like even knowing they don't work, it's stressful to be strapped into that chair, and even knowing the technician is probably lying when they say they're detecting deception on a particular question, it's stressful when they accuse you of lying. I bet a lot of people crack and admit to things they were hoping to hide.
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.
While I totally agree with you, I... have a theory.
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.
The issue is accuracy. In terms of being able to infer lies from skin response, this is an effect that actually exists for many people. The net scientific conclusion is that can work but poorly, not that is is complete nonsense like ESP or something.
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.
You're not wrong, but it's a little rich that a site full of programmers, of all professions, can't understand why an interview procedure exists even though everyone knows it's bullshit: done any whiteboard coding questions recently?
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.
I agree it should never, ever be used in any capacity when it comes to criminal proceedings, but as an employment requirement, I think the 3-letter agencies should keep them, and I suspect they will unless/until they perhaps obtain some literal mind-reading technology.
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.
Esp. w/ someone who has the constitution of a secret agent, who is literally trained to lead a secret life. If they can't fool a device like this how can they be expected to fool high-level operatives in their adversary's intelligence agencies for decades on end?
> Why the US still puts so much weight on them when they know they don't work is a mystery to me.
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?
It's a bit of a joke, really. I doubt there's anyone reading this on here who didn't already know polygraphs don't work. The only people who don't seem to know polygraphs don't work are the ones making national security decisions relating to polygraphs.
The polygraph process is not a technical one, but a psychological one. The point is not to detect a lie by "registering it" on the tool, its to create a situation where a person self-elects information because they believe the machine _could_ detect a lie. Its a huge dog-and-pony show, and the poly operators play it as a big game.
So, polys _do_ sort of work, but not in the way they are presented to the public.
My guess is that this works just like how it does in corporate security: It is vastly easier to add a new security policy than it is to remove it. Even when everyone knows something is useless or perhaps even harmful, nobody wants to be in a position to be held culpable on the off chance that retiring the policy is implicated in a future breach.
The trope that they are meaningful continues on shows like "Dateline" where local cops drop "persons of interest" after "passing" one. And insinuate that someone that refuses one is guilty, etc. It's really odd to me that the general public has no idea that polygraphs are complete bullshit.
let's get real, polygraphs are a ruse in order to humiliate people and see how they react in torture situations. Using them is a power play. It lets the victim know who the boss is.
I'd guess that polygraph tests need belief into them working, thus making it work. Polygraphs should be able to (at least) measure nervousness correctly (e.g. due to transpiration), so if you believe polygraphs may work you're probably someone on which they will work (1).
In other words, long proven nonsense as long as you don't believe in it.
My understanding is polygraphs are used as a tool to have people trip over themselves by using it as a prop when the administrator thinks they have something to catch them on.
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?
Exactly. It's just an interrogation technique but you need one less body on the payroll because you don't need a "good cop".
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.
I read an article somewhere in which a cop told the story of conducting an interrogation using an ersatz lie detector. If he thought the suspect was lying, he'd push a button, and out would come a piece of paper saying "He's lying."
fMRI machines are still quite expensive and require a technician to operate and calibrate. They also require the subject to be sitting/lying still inside the machine while it is being operated in order to get any kind of useful measurements.
Not really sure what the consensus among neuroscientists and psychologists is with regard to weather they are reliable lie detectors or not though.
In a bit skeptical of the 50% number mentioned. I think the newspaper article might be misquoting the source. I know people who have failed lifestyle polygraphs and weren't banned for life, they just had to try again
Many of the water companies in the UK still use divining rods to locate pipes, there's a lot of bollocks used in places that really ought to know better.
Polygraphs are comic book technology. The first one was invented by the guy who created Wonder Woman and they were popularized by a commercial for Gillette razors. It's as ridiculous as determining guilt by batarang or kryptonite. It's amazing we still allow them in law enforcement.
The polygraph was largely invented by William Moulton Marston, the same guy who invented Wonder Woman. It was clearly a farce when he was selling this idea 100 years ago, and it's amazing that it's considered anything short of snake oil today.
No, they would just break your fingers or <insert torture> until you admitted to basically anything just to make them stop. They didin't need a polygraph for that, just a hammer, a drawer or a door.
Why doesn’t the CIA just come out and tell all their recruits, we trust you and most of you truly believe in the mission and will never compromise but there are always a group of turncoats who will sell secrets or have other affiliations. Due to this we will monitor your credit and you will not know if the persons you are working with are internal investigators and we will have randomized investigations as matter of course up to the director.
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.
From Wikipedia: "A comprehensive 2003 review by the National Academy of Sciences of existing research concluded that there was "little basis for the expectation that a polygraph test could have extremely high accuracy."
The cited article: The Polygraph and Lie Detection. National Research Council. 2003. ISBN 978-0-309-26392-4.
(https://www.nap.edu/catalog/10420/the-polygraph-and-lie-dete...)
I know we all know that polygraphs don't work, but: is that true in practice or in principle?
I mean, there are papers out there about methods capable of extracting complete words from brainwaves. Does it really seem impossible for a machine with current tech to detect signals of lying with high certainty?
It works the other way around: polygraphs need to show that they work in replicated, controlled experiments.
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."
"I mean, there are papers out there about methods capable of extracting complete words from brainwaves"
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 think at some point you might be able to detect lying with high accuracy given a DNA sample, a high resolution/high fps camera pointed at the person's face, and a vocoder-generated questioning regime.
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 think a good liar is just exceptionally good at convincing themselves that what they're saying is the truth. I think that even better liars are so narcissistic that they basically believe what they say as it's coming out of their mouth, on account of it being them that is the one saying it.
You clench you butt cheeks when they do the calibration when you want something to register as a lie. So you tell a truth and then clench your butt cheeks for calibrating a lie. Thus they get a strong response on a truth/lie and a less strong response on a lie. The other trick is to recall a traumatic event.
Polygraphs are a joke for this reason among so many others: Psychopaths, sociopaths and narcissists can fool them because they are able to feel zero (or are incapable of feeling any) biological fear or anxiety (i.e. 'stress response'), while telling complete lies.
Which is a bit horrific when you realize they act as sieves promoting the hire of such people in a higher proportion than the general population. Polygraphs are worse than useless and mere jokes; they are selectors for a kakistocracy amongst the executive levels of American governance!
jacquesm|5 years ago
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.
Imnimo|5 years ago
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.
kelvin0|5 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADE_651
Sold to law enforcement in military around the world for a while.
donw|5 years ago
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.
unishark|5 years ago
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.
Analemma_|5 years ago
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.
meowface|5 years ago
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.
abstractbarista|5 years ago
unknown|5 years ago
[deleted]
brandall10|5 years ago
RspecMAuthortah|5 years ago
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?
secondcoming|5 years ago
(NSFW) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJ5aIvjNgao
moomin|5 years ago
JamesSwift|5 years ago
So, polys _do_ sort of work, but not in the way they are presented to the public.
mumblemumble|5 years ago
tyingq|5 years ago
bluntfang|5 years ago
LatteLazy|5 years ago
AdmiralGinge|5 years ago
ed_elliott_asc|5 years ago
firebaze|5 years ago
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)
mc32|5 years ago
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?
throwaway0a5e|5 years ago
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.
thaumasiotes|5 years ago
It was a Xerox machine.
KvanteKat|5 years ago
Not really sure what the consensus among neuroscientists and psychologists is with regard to weather they are reliable lie detectors or not though.
ferros|5 years ago
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.
bluGill|5 years ago
Rebelgecko|5 years ago
roguesupport|5 years ago
AdmiralGinge|5 years ago
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/nov/21/uk-water-fi...
PedroBatista|5 years ago
TechBro8615|5 years ago
TheSpiceIsLife|5 years ago
Just call it "AI".
rsynnott|5 years ago
rasz|5 years ago
kevin_thibedeau|5 years ago
tolbish|5 years ago
[deleted]
aiyodev|5 years ago
alex_young|5 years ago
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...
rshnotsecure|5 years ago
wongarsu|5 years ago
actuator|5 years ago
yyx|5 years ago
jacobush|5 years ago
booleandilemma|5 years ago
petre|5 years ago
fmakunbound|5 years ago
* lie detectors/polygraphs
* blood splatter patterns
* hair analysis
* bite mark analysis
* criminal profiling
ohm|5 years ago
mc32|5 years ago
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.
unknown|5 years ago
[deleted]
herodotus|5 years ago
vslira|5 years ago
donw|5 years ago
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."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygraph
throw1234651234|5 years ago
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.
SamReidHughes|5 years ago
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.
unknown|5 years ago
[deleted]
ralusek|5 years ago
I say all of this as a horrible liar.
StreamBright|5 years ago
dirtnugget|5 years ago
kls|5 years ago
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/how-cheat-lie-detec...
rasz|5 years ago
1/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fm2W0sq9ddU
2/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADE_651
wayanon|5 years ago
mindfulhack|5 years ago
XaoDaoCaoCao|5 years ago
everdrive|5 years ago
unknown|5 years ago
[deleted]
fakeslimshady|5 years ago
[deleted]
unnouinceput|5 years ago
re|5 years ago