treetop wrote on Jul 2
nd, 2003 at 9:53am:
During a Relevant/Irrelevant test, when should one employ countermeasures? How can countermeasures be used to avoid give a "con-spec-nificant" result? From what I have read, I would be lead to believe that I would use countermeasures to enhance the responces to irrelevant questions and try to relax and keep baseline breathing during the relevant questions. Any advice or thoughts?
Treetop,
Unfortunately, the R/I test doesn't seem to have an easy physiological countermeasure like the CQT, since there are no control questions upon which one may augment responses. The advantage, though, is that the R/I exam is so thoroughly flawed and produces so many false positives (and that fact is widely known) that behavioral countermeasures combined with a lack of confessions may carry you through.
You might try randomly augmenting on various relevant questions as well as on irrelevant and "sacrifice relevant" questions that come at the beginning/end of a question set.
You might also try keeping a relatively augmented state going for most of the session.
I should note, however, that I know of no one who has tried either of those techniques, so can't gauge the results.
As you noted, examiners on R/I exams (e.g. for NSA screening) look for "con-spec-nificant" responses. I would think the key, if there is one, would be to obscure findings on the "specific" and "significant" criteria.
The bottom line, though is that R/I exams primarily seem to be used not for "truth telling", but rather as leverage for getting confessions.
Skeptic