Public Servant,
You wrote in part:
Quote:Running three charts and asking questions again, is part of the examination process. It's a way of determining consitency. One response might have been a fluke; consitent response indicates the question truly concerns you (ie not completely truthful).
That a person consistently shows a physiological response to a question is no clear indication that the person has not been completely truthful. As Professor John Furedy
has observed, the polygraph is "virtually useless for differentiating the anxious-but-innocent person from the anxious-and-guilty one."
David Renzelman, the disgraced former head of the DOE polygraph program, gave a candid explanation of this at the first public meeting held by the National Academy of Sciences' Committee to Review the Scientific Evidence on the Polygraph. He said:
Quote:Polygraph is only a means of...of...of looking at emotion that is taking place at the time a person listens to, thinks about, answers a question that the examiner and the person taking the test has agreed upon originally. And if the answer to that question bothers the person taking the test, then it tends to bother us. And then it's our job to find out, 'Why did that bother you?'
The polygraph cannot tell
why a question "bothers" a person, and there is no scientific basis for assuming that because a person physiologically responds when answering a question, he/she has not been completely truthful. Conversely, lack of a consistent physiological response to a question is no clear indication that the subject has been completely truthful.