About time you guys (or gals) came out in force.  You get real sensitive about that coveted holy grail you call the NAS Study.  I can't respond to all of you but s-X-e put a quote from the NAS Study in here that sums it all up:

"The quality of studies varies considerably, but falls far short of what is desirable. Laboratory studies suffer from lack of realism, and in the randomized controlled studies focused on specific incidents using mock crimes, the consequences associated with lying or being judged deceptive almost never mirror the seriousness of these actions in real-world settings in which the polygraph is used. Field studies have major problems with identifying the truth against which test results should be judged. In addition, they suffer from problems associated with heterogeneity and lack of control of extraneous factors and more generally, they have lower quality than could be achieved with careful study design. Moreover, most of the research, in both the laboratory and in the field, does not fully address key potential threats to validity. For these reasons, study results cannot be expected to generalize to practical contexts." 

This statement pretty much sums it up.  You can never conduct a true validity assessment unless you use real cases.  I think I've made this point with the big guy (George).  Once again I will reiterate, I'm not concerned with the scientific validity of polygraph.  I know as an investigative tool it works quite well.  I don't have any study to back me up but I have 20+ years of law enforcement interviews and interrogations to back it up.  All this website does is (in my view) extend the length of the interrogation/interview but in the end we get the same results.

Saidme,

You never answered my questions about Dr. Drew Richardson's findings about the CQT?

Was he wrong too?  
 

Are you a polyscore man?  Or do you use another system?

Saidme wrote on Jul 16^th, 2003 at 3:43am:


I will agree easily that the polygraph is probably awesome at getting confessions out of guilty people. However, as a tool for determining lies from truth, I think it's lack of scientific validity makes it worse than worthless. If you are going to argue that for the polygraph to work well, all it needs to do is get people to confess, then yes, it does work well. But what about those examinees who do not confess, and maintain sincerely that they have not lied during their exam? Without a sound scientific basis to back up the instrument's readings, you cannot conclusively say that they were deceptive.

At best, it is a convincing prop.

You are correct, I just skimmed it.  Bullshit nevertheless.

I don't know much about Dr Drew.  As I've seen on this website PhD stands for piled high and deeper.  I think that was the way they characterized Mr Gelb.  I haven't read anything on how Drew feels about CQT and I really don't care what he thinks.  I use the technique regularly with excellent results.  So in a nutshell, if Drew has a problem with it then yes, bullshit would be appropriate.
   
Polyscore is a bunch of crap.  Great for interrogations though.

Former APA member.  They really provided nothing of value.

Gotta go back to Cloud city.

Read, skimmed, what's the difference!  Examiner's tend to lose interest as soon as they see the bias involved.  Not really brave, just a good dose of reality.