George Maschke wrote:


Quote:

Absent an admission from the subject that he/she used countermeasures, how can a polygraph examiner "confirm" that any of the various countermeasures described in The Lie Behind the Lie Detector were employed?

There may be a problem with semantics here.  I did not mean confirm in the sense of absolute ground truth.  That is extremely difficult to do in any real world situation.  Therein lies the big advantage of laboratory research, where we made our initial breakthroughs in detecting mid- and high level countermeasures.  What I did mean was confirm to the satisfaction of the individual agency.  The steps that must be accomplished to reach that level of confirmation vary from one agency to another.  The key point is that in the Federal government, most examiners do not make such a decision arbitrarily.  They must follow their agency’s guidelines, which may require concurrence from their quality control office.


Quote:

What would you say to the earnest employee or applicant for employment who wants a straightforward answer to this simple question: what will the polygrapher do if I admit to him/her that I understand "the lie behind the lie detector" (i.e., the trickery on which polygraph "testing" depends)?

This approach is so new the field has not developed any uniform response, not in the federal community and certainly not in the police and private arenas.  The only research bearing on this has been done by Honts and his colleagues.  They have published a couple of studies which found, among other things, that subjects who are aware of the purpose of control/comparison questions are at greater risk of a false positive error.  This is another down side to making polygraph information available to the public.  In their understandable desire to help innocent people avoid false positive errors, the authors may be inadvertently increasing the risk for some people.

As for how I would deal with the situation, I would have no qualms about conducting an examination.  My personal outlook is “when in doubt, give it a try and see what happens.”  I would go into the situation with my eyes open, aware of the pitfalls, and make sure that the person receiving my report was also aware of the need for caution in relying upon the results.  When I was an examiner in private practice, I tested several polygraph examiners on real world matters.  The only thing I did differently from testing a naïve subject was to use a relevant/irrelevant (RI) test format, which is less susceptible to point countermeasures.  The RI test is far more sophisticated in design and interpretation than most critics give it credit for.  To be used successfully, I believe it requires formal training followed by an internship under experienced practitioners, so this option is not realistic for many examiners.

Peace