MagicSteve,
(Still trying to assume you are a licensed professional and not a convicted sex offender).
You came here asking a question or seeking information, and you just offered up a bunch of straw-man arguments and insults that seem to have the effect of quashing and avoiding the discussion.
While we all know there is no such thing as a perfect test of any kind - because all tests and all test results are probabilistic solutions when we can achieve neither perfect deterministic solutions nor physical/linear measurement - there does not seem to be an convincing evidence to support your assertion that the polygraph can be easily defeated or that merely not believing in it makes all that much (if any) difference.
The NRC commented on this if you want an academic source from outside the polygraph profession. What they said was that claims that it is "easy" to defeat require scientific evidence, yet they were aware of none at the time. In fact they summarized the literature as contraindicating attempts to help oneself if one is truthful because of the increased likelihood of being classified as deceptive.
But yes there are some interesting, and fun, differences in human reactions to the same stimuli. But there are also more similarities than differences - and people tend to treat each other nicer and engage in less social and interpersonal violence when they remember this.
The overall balance of similarities and differences among people such that a lot about social and behavioral science is all about studying these things. Scientific tests, for example, tend to be built around things are going to be similar for most people most of time, and sometimes also make use of things that we can identify as more likely to be different in ways that are similarly predictable (though still noisy).
Data from humans are noisy. We know that. Otherwise, tests like the well-known MMPI and others would not need so many questions.
And, as you must undoubtedly be aware (being in a professional in which you offer up professional licensed opinions) many of the risk assessment models in use with sex offenders today also make use of multiple data points because the correlation between the data points and the criterion of risk (for some future event or type of behavior) may be statistically significant but is also noisy. Medicine has this same problem, and most diagnosis are made only after observing multiple symptoms. Data are so noisy that diagnostic work is actually difficult.
Despite the noisy data and individual differences there are still more similarities than differences. People smile when they are happy (mostly) and don’t smile when they are not (mostly). People sometimes hide their true feelings, but generally, laughing is a sign of enjoyment and pleasure and fun, and scowling is a sign of displeasure.
And we have the problem that some of the most interesting things to measure are sometimes quite awfully difficult to actually measure.
As you your concern about attempting to "measure something that science cannot even prove exists” … I’m going to go out on a limb and speculate that you might be spending too much time inside with criminal offenders and not enough time thinking about science and how science works. According to Popper (among the most important philosophers of science during the 20th century) scientific statements are those that are “falsifiable” or capable of being proved false. This is because the limits of our human knowledge is such that we will probably never know everything, and so all of our knowledge is incomplete. To the extent that our knowledge and ideas are incomplete they are also wrong. Science is about finding out where our ideas are incorrect and then developing new knowledge and new ideas that are simply less incorrect. But we will never know everything and so we are always incomplete and always at least partially incorrect. Science is about learning to be less wrong. To do that, scientific statements need to be falsifiable.
Now some offenders would prefer to say that because we can prove nothing with certainty it means that nothing is real and therefore nothing matters. And because we cannot know with certainty then we can know nothing. These same offenders also tend to deny not only the facts and circumstances of their offenses but also the impact of their offenses and any related or resulting meaning about what kind of person the are or who they are a social and interpersonal and even existential level.
In the case of the polygraph and what it actually measures, try this.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/60215924/Publications/what_does_the_polygrap... But I get it. If we take the view there is no “real” difference between deception and truth telling - or the view that it means nothing, does not matter, makes no difference, or that there is no difference between doing something (such as committing a sex offense) and not doing something, then there would be in reality nothing to measure.
Conversely, if we take the view that behavior matters, because it means something, and because it has an impact on others, and because those others matter (i.e., the individuals have meaning in an existential and ethical sense) - then maybe there is, in reality, a difference between doing something (such as committing a sexual offense) and not doing it.
And if we choose to work in a licensed profession while holding reality view that behavior matters then we will want to make sure that our own choices and decisions are consistent with reality.
The boiled-down theory of the polygraph (or any credibility assessment test) is this: recordable changes occur in physiological activity as a function of deception and truth-telling. You can chose to reject the idea, but the evidence seems to agree that some noisy changes do occur and that some imperfect probabilistic inference of deception and truth is achievable.
But if we choose to work in a licensed profession while holding the non-reality view that there exists nothing to measure simply because it cannot be “proved” then maybe it really is all about the money for some.
.02
rn
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Texas sex offender & mandatory polygraph (Read 326736 times)
