South African Business News Editor Philip Devine on Polygraphs

Philip Devine, editor of South Africa’s Business Report Online, offers a critical assessment of polygraph “testing” and gives a nod to AntiPolygraph.org in a 3 November 2006 editorial article titled, “Big fat liar”:

Big fat liar
November 3, 2006

By Philip Devine

The use of ‘lie detector’ machines in South Africa is not often something that makes the news, but when it does the device is viewed as a holy grail of truth. Some myths surrounding the use of these devices need to be destroyed.

The machine is not a lie detector, it helps to administer a polygraph test. It can’t detect a lie any more than the average person can detect a quark or neutrino. But people persist in believing it can and many operators of such equipment like to maintain the image of a machine that can root out lies, because it provides a suitable psychological edge, without which the it would be more difficult to administer the tests.

Mxolisi Zwane, the executive chairman of Premier Foods, was determined that polygraph testing would help him unmask the source of a story published in a local daily. In August he ordered all his board members to undergo a polygraph test, so that he could find out who among them was the untrustworthy source – if they even existed there.

It is not known if the board ever underwent testing, or agreed to it, because Zwane and his spokespeople at Premier became incredibly tight-lipped after Business Report published the story surrounding the controversy at the milling company.

And besides, if you were one of the members of the Premier board, would you want to subject yourself to a test that is only between 80 and 90 percent accurate? And that’s according to some of the polygraph’s biggest proponents.

That means in a group of 100 people, as many as twenty of those would be fingered for being deceitful, when they are in fact completely innocent. Not fantastic odds to submit yourself to when your job and reputation is on the line.

Also being questioned here, is the legality of polygraph testing. Our dispute resolution body, the Commission for Conciliation Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA) even admits that when its comes to polygraphs that “to date, there is no known device, which measures physiological or psychological activity, [that is] capable of directly recording deception.”

In fact, polygraph testing seems to be more of psuedo- human science than science itself.

In South Africa our courts do not accept that polygraph tests are reliable and admissible and state that although admissible as expert evidence, polygraph results standing alone cannot prove guilt.

I would suggest that the best thing anyone could do with regards to polygraph testing is to read a copy of antipolygraph.org’s publication, The Lie Behind The Lie Detector, and arm themselves against the use of such tests as a means of forcing consent or workplace abuse. And that’s the truth.

Philip Devine is the editor of Business Report Online