wrote on Oct 14^th, 2002 at 10:50am:

Beech, That doesn't sound like an attack necessarily on polygraph.  It sounds more like you don't believe in the entire screening process.

I'm sorry you feel that way. You are the second pro-polygraph individual on this board to draw the inference that because I believe reliance on a polygraph interrogation as part of a pre-employment condition of hire is fundamentally wrong, wasteful, and results in an extraordinary amount of people being excluded from hiring, that this also means I find the whole screening process lacking.

Such is not the case. I limit my criticism (at least within this current topic) to the use of the polygraph in pre-employment screening. To quote the NAS Executive Summary:

The use of polygraph testing for preemployment screening is even more complicated because it involves inferences about future behavior on the basis of information about past behaviors that may be quite different (e.g., does past use of illegal drugs, or lying about such use on a polygraph test, predict future spying?)... Scientific evidence relevant to the accuracy of polygraph tests for employee or preemployment screening is extremely limited. Only one field study, which is flawed, provides evidence directly relevant to accuracy for preemployment screening... Because the studies of acceptable quality [of the polygraph] all focus on specific incidents, generalization from them to uses for screening is not justified. [NAS's emphasis]


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You're saying that past behavior might not be a predicting factor for future behavior.

No-o-o-o-o-o I'm not saying that either, although the NAS does make that point in their report. I'm saying that the polygraph is worse than useless in determining that prior behavior.


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Not something I would completely disagree with--especially when it comes to "did you smoke marijuana 10 times or 11 times"... as if the eleventh time makes you a potential crook, but the first ten indicate good character.  Of course it would be nice to know if someone is an undetected felon or is affiliated with terrorist/foreign intelligence agencies (hopefully zero is the cutoff for those).  Either way, this argument is an overall suitability for employment in a sensitive positions issue--NOT a poly issue.

So it's 'Blame The Test-taker' now? You are playing an extraordinary game of Pass The Buck, and it's really ill-beseeming.


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You have given one (of many I am sure) example of someone who might have beaten the poly or, quite possibly, had absolutely no prior history of deviant behavior, and still went bad.

You raise an interesing tangential point. As I have heard first-hand detectives utter sentiments such as "When a perp is caught, the chances that it's the very first time that person is commiting the offense are so astronomically low as to be insignificant", one has to wonder. When a person placed in a position of trust over others (such as a police officer) decides to abuse that power, one must ask 'what went wrong'. Either the crucible of holding such power over others was to great for that person's character (certainly possible) OR that person's character was already established through prior bad acts that the polygrapher (in part) failed to detect.


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Mark it down on the calendar.  I found something on which I agreed with Beech Trees. Don't get too excited though, because I'd like to add that he seems to just love pointing out every bad cop in the world as evidence that cops and polygraph(er)s are BAD.

I think it's really unfortunate you feel that way. If you take a moment to think about it, I have been a vociferous critic of the use of the polygraph in almost EVERY possible setting.