Dear Paul,
Thanks for taking the time to reply and clarify your remarks. I understand that your comments were not directed at any one website in particular, but I think you made some generalizations that don't stand up to scrutiny, as I'll discuss below, among other things.
With regard to your claim that "these Anti sites create more problems for people than they ever resolve" you explained:
Quote:The first comment I make in regard to creating problems is in relation to the use of countermeasures. Unless someone has access to a trained examiner and polygraph to practice on their chances of pulling off a false negative are small if they are lying. They will increase their chances of being caught using them, and if they are truthful which by your comments everyone should use them because polygraph results are going to victimise innocent people most of the time.
There are a number of cases were people have been caught using countermeasures and they did create problems for themselves as a result.If they were truthful and using them and got caught even worse.
The assertion that hands-on training is necessary for the successful employment of polygraph countermeasures is ridiculous (but no doubt comforting for the polygraph community to believe). Charles Honts has suggested that that his research indicates "that in order for countermeasures to be effective the subject must receive some specialized training in their use and that merely furnishing a subject with information about countermeasures does not appear to work." (
testimony in
United States v. William Galbreth). But in Honts' research purporting to indicate that merely being furnished with information about polygraphy doesn't enable persons to defeat polygraph "testing" and that "hands-on training" is required, the "information only" subjects of his experiments were provided a maximum of 15 minutes of instruction!
Is it reasonable to suppose that anyone reading about how to pass a polygraph "test" will limit his study to 15 minutes?! If you were studying polygraph countermeasures -- whether to protect yourself from a false positive outcome or to deliberately deceive a polygraph examiner about relevant issues -- would you devote no more than a mere 15 minutes to it?
Moreover, those subjects who
were given "hands-on training" in countermeasures received a maximum of 30 minutes of instruction. Graduate students read them a script teaching them about the theory of the "Control" Question "Test" and explaining how to apply either physical or mental countermeasures while answering the "control" questions. Then the volunteers practiced a bit. 30 minutes maximum.
But even this is an unrealistically short period of "training" for someone for whom the outcome of a polygraph "test" is of major importance. If anything, Honts' research suggests that it takes little instruction and practice to learn how to defeat a polygraph "test."
So Honts et al.'s countermeasures studies are flimsy support for your assertion that, "Unless someone has access to a trained examiner and polygraph to practice on their chances of pulling off a false negative are small if they are lying."
You further assert that such persons, "will increase their chances of being caught using them." On what basis do you make this claim? In Honts et al.'s countermeasures studies, experienced polygraphers were unable to identify countermeasures attempts at better than chance levels.
When you say, "by your comments everyone should use [countermeasures] because polygraph results are going to victimise innocent people most of the time." Here, you've mischaracterized my comments. I've never claimed that polygraph results are going to victimize innocent people most of the time. But for innocent persons, there is a
significant risk of a false positive outcome, and it is thus in their interest to do that which is possible to minimize that risk.
While there may be instances where persons have been accused of using countermeasures have admitted it, the truth of the matter is that the polygraph community has no reliable method for detecting the kinds of countermeasures described in
The Lie Behind the Lie Detector, and the only way that the use of such countermeasures can be confirmed is if the subject admits it.
When you claimed that "these Anti sites create more problems for people than they ever resolve,"
you made a claim that you cannot possibly know to be true. You also write:
Quote:Misinformation is that innocent people are almost always called deceptive. Duc 748 is evidence that is not true along with a few others posting to us . Polygraph accuracy is as good as chance this has also been refuted by Lykken in a letter to Raskin stateing in his opinion polygraph was 90% accurate if conducted by a competant and skilled examiner.
Iacono also admitted under cross that in his opinion polygraph results were about 75% accurate. Lykken was also an expert witness for the admission of polygraph evidence.I only mention this because it seems that his ideas influence the scope of this site and hence misleading information.
AntiPolygraph.org doesn't claim that "innocent people are almost always called deceptive," and I'm not aware of any other antipolygraph website that does. But innocent people are called deceptive often enough based on the pseudoscience of polygraphy that it is prudent for innocent people to take measures to protect themselves.
With regard to the validity of polygraphy, Lykken's and Iacono's (or anybody's) opinions regarding how often polygraph interrogators make correct decisions is no evidence whatsoever for the validity of the polygraph technique itself, which both Lykken and Iacono reject.
It remains the case that "control" question "test" polygraphy has not been proven by peer-reviewed research to work better than chance. And as explained in Chapter 1 of
The Lie Behind the Lie Detector and the sources cited there, no true validity is possible for CQT polygraphy because the procedure lacks both standardization and scientific control. Regarding this latter point, you may find Dr. Richardson's
comments to the National Academy of Sciences regarding scientific control and polygraphy to be instructive.
You also write:
Quote:You cannot guarantee that readers will be able to effectively use countermeasures, yet they are told it is easy to do.
You're right. We cannot guarantee that readers will be able to effectively use countermeasures, but that doesn't change the fact that it's not terribly difficult to do. We provide readers with detailed information on polygraph countermeasures along with ample references that they can check. The choice of whether to use countermeasures or not is necessarily left to the reader.
Quote:Anyone who states they pulled it off are admitting they lied on the test and that is who you helped.
It should be borne in mind, Paul, that in every polygraph examination, at least one person truly is deceptive:
the polygraph examiner. The person who chooses to use polygraph countermeasures may or may not have lied with regard to the relevant questions. While AntiPolygraph.org's purpose is to help innocent/truthful persons protect themselves from polygraph abuse, it goes without saying that this same information could also be used by guilty/deceptive persons. This is unavoidable.
Quote:You have no scientific support for countermeasures either yet people are led to beleive they work you have no more proof than I do that they don't.
While polygraph countermeasures, like polygraphy itself, is not the kind of procedure for which any predictive validity can be determined, Honts et al.'s peer-reviewed countermeasures studies (abstracts are provided in the bibliography of
The Lie Behind the Lie Detector) provide a reasonable basis for the belief that such countermeasures are simple to learn, likely to be effective, and that polygraphers cannot detect them.
With regard to your remark, "The funny thing about anti sites is that if you used countermeasures and told the truth you beat the polygraph [sic]" you explained:
Quote:I read it on nopolygraph site about telling the truth and passing or stoppolygraph one of them and putting it down to countermeasure use, months ago when talking with shropshire lad and no it is not a confabulation as you put it.
I somehow couldn't find the message to which you refer. Perhaps you could post a link? In any event, is it reasonable to characterize the arguments of not just one antipolygraph website, but all, on the basis of one message posted by a user of a single message board? All you've really done here is to raise a straw man argument. Nobody is claiming that if a truthful person successfully uses countermeasures to protect himself against a false positive outcome, he has somehow "beaten" the polygraph.
Quote:My definition of hype innocent people will all fail screening polygraph tests .
AntiPolygraph.org doesn't make this claim, and I don't know of any reasonable person who does. More apparent confabulation on your part, Paul.
With regard to your claim that "[a] normal honest person will have no trouble passing a test," you explained:
Quote:I make the claim normal innocent people will pass a polygraph based on reports from the Doe with no false positive errors and the DOD . Since there is no peer reviewed scientific literature on screening that I am aware of that is where I base my opinion.
Certainly, almost everyone who submits to a DOE or DoD counterintelligence-scope polygraph interrogation ultimately passes. But this is only because DOE and DoD polygraphers are ultimately ignoring the charts and giving a pass to those who don't make any substantive admissions, as I explained in a
letter to U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. In this context, it is precisely the honest person who admits all that is most likely to "fail," while the dishonest person who steadfastly denies everything will almost certainly be cleared in the end.
But such is not the case in other agencies, especially in pre-employment screening. About 20% of FBI applicants who make it as far as the polygraph are rejected on the basis of their polygraph results. In the Los Angeles Police Department, the comparable figure is about 50%. In the process, many truthful applicants are being wrongly branded as liars.
I agree with you that screening "tests" are controversial. But it is not just screening "tests" that are controversial:
all CQT polygraphy is controversial because the procedure is, intrinsically, a fraud. But with more and more people who are subjected to polygraphy discovering "the lie behind the lie detector" for themselves, the polygraph house of cards is poised for collapse.
Again, I thank you for clarifying the comments you posted to the PolygraphPlace.com message board. If you (or anyone else in the polygraph community) find anything on AntiPolygraph.org that you think is false, misleading, or otherwise unfair, you're welcome to post your views on this message board (anonymously, if you prefer). That way, your comments will reach the growing numbers of people who are coming to this site to learn about and discuss polygraphy. (Your posts won't be deleted, like mine would be if I posted to PolygraphPlace.com.)